Vadeli (and other immortals)

[Hannu Kokko]

Have been wondering about the effect of immortality (or near immortality) of individuals to their skill sets (whether Herowars, RQ or others).

If an individuals of race are immortal or very long lived barring violent etc deaths the majority of individuals encountered would likely be ‘old’or really old – which could mean very experienced in the skills that the individual practices in. So for example Vadeli are mentioned to be experts in sorcery, Red Vadeli very good at war, all Vadeli masterful at telling lies/deceit, Brown Vadeli might be superior traders… and even with lesser skills they might have practiced so long that by sheer number of years of practice they could be quite high on the skills.

How have you handled in your versions of Glorantha this. If you encounter Vadeli in their Vadeli slums or on their merchant ships – are most of them at minimum couple of masteries in their special skills and close to mastery or above in the more common skills. In RQ terms – 120% or more might be multiple mastery or 100% a mastery…

Same would hold for Brithini, Luathans – maybe some Mostali…

[Peter Metcalfe]

A cost of immortality might be a general resistance to change and learning in particular. Thus the Vadeli and other immortals might be ages old but they will never learn as fast as a mortal.

Secondly while an immortal may be very good at one or two skills, they might be no better than mortals in other skills (like ordinary social and commercial interactions). Thus a Vadeli society might resemble a human society in problems in dealing with the outside world.

Now for the general age of the Vadeli, I don’t think most of them are that old. For a long period of time, they were cooped up on the Vadeli Isles and competition for a place in Vadeli society would have been intense due to the severe limits. Those longest-lived would not be the most powerful (because other Vadeli would gang up on them to take them down) but the meekest because being no threat to others, they are the least likely (but still possible) targets of other Vadeli.

Come the Opening and the Vadeli are no longer forced to prey on each other but can sail away and attempt to find other places to establish themselves and have kids etc. Also because the Vadeli Isles are so bleak, there’s a general exodus. So I would expect most Vadeli alive today to being no older than the Opening (which means 40 years or thereabouts). They’ve also taken huge knocks like the destruction of the Vadeli Empire which would have wiped out their best and brightest.

[Robin Mitra]

Well, in HeroQuest it depends whether they are player characters or non player characters. If you are talking about PCs I would create the characters just normally with ratings between 13 and 7W, but many contests against mortals would be in fact automatic victories. But then again if your group is playing a platoon of Red Vadeli their adventures are probably not about killing some local thugs on the road anyway.

I the immortals are NPCs they don’t have ability ratings, they have resistances. The difference is not only in words but also in game procedure. For example the contest “Surviving contact with Luatha” would be almost impossible, the contest “Winning a stone masonry contest against a Mostali” would be very hard, the contest “Kill the Brown Vadeli after he tricked you” would be hard.

In Heroquest ratings and restistances are not absolute but relative numbers. That makes the constest very easy to handle.

[Pentallion]

I wondered the same about Dragonewts. They hatch out of their eggs with their memories and skills intact. so when you meet one, you’re meeting someone who is vastly old and should have incredible skills. Not really interested in HQ handling of this, but from a RQ perspective, they should pretty much be masters of a huge array of skills.

[Peter Metcalfe]

Sandy handled this in RQ by having dragonewts only making skill checks when they were killed. In other words, there were scout dragonewts who had been so since the Dawn.

[boztakang]

I suspect that having “skills” would also count as an entanglement with the world… which might be highly undesirable for Dragonewts. Part of their strange behavior could be the result of trying to randomize their experience enough to prevent skill checks in things that aren’t sufficiently draconic.

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