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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!duke!unc!tim
From: tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: net.games.frp
Subject: Re: Deities, magic, Oaths (one DM"s opinion)
Message-ID: <5977@unc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Oct-83 10:31:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.5977
Posted: Wed Oct  5 10:31:54 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Oct-83 04:05:25 EDT
References: lanl-a.2390
Lines: 51


It is not just a matter of making up a new rule that governs the
consequences of breaking an oath.  To break an oath (or to make an oath
falsely) is to lie.  Lying is always motivated by fear of the possible
consequences of telling the truth to the person who is lied to.  (There are
other possible motivations for lying, but the act of lying is interpreted as
an admission of fear by almost every sentience in the universe.)  Given
this, it would be an incredible thing if a god were to lie to a mortal.  The
god would be implicitly expressing fear of the mortal, and would lose a
great deal of face, and probably lose a good number of worshippers.  Note
that this is not any magic effect that I'm talking about, just public
relations, which even the chaotic evil gods have to worry about if they want
to keep their worshippers and servitors.

The upshot of this is that Orcus would no more lie to you than he would
kneel to you.  The loss of status in each case is comparable.  The only gods
that would ever stoop to lie to a mortal are gods whose nature is explicitly
illusory above all else -- for instance, Loki or Trickster.  Even in these
cases, they will prefer to tell the exact truth in a deceptive way, and
there will be some loss of face involved in them taking the easy way out and
just plain lying -- any idiot can lie, but deceiving someone with the truth
takes a good deal more skill.

What is more, any asking by a mortal of a guarantee that the god is not
lying will be treated as the insult it is.  The most probable reaction of
the god to being insulted in this way is to kill the mortal.  Again, an
explicitly illusory god will prefer to give some seemingly irrefutable token
of faithfulness which in fact is nothing of the kind.

Of course, this says nothing about mortals taking oaths.  This is a
situation that arrives with reasonable frequency.  The best way to deal with
this is to either invent a new clerical spell Oath (like the Rune Spell of
the same name belonging to Humakt in RuneQuest) having the desired
characteristics, or to add a few rules to the basic idea of swearing by your
god.  The latter approach could involve something like the following:
Breaking a solemn oath sworn to your god causes the god to astrally mark
you.  A being with an astral mark cannot receive clerical spells from any
source -- this includes most healing, so it is not a thing to take lightly.
The mark can be removed by Atonement, but only if the breach of oath was
involuntary.  Otherwise, nothing short of major questing for the church will
ever allow the mark to be removed.  More detail can be added by individual
DM's as well as I could add it, so I won't go into it more here.  This does
not seem an excessive consequence, in a world where there are real gods.
Swearing an oath by someone and breaking it is a direct insult to the being
sworn by, and you are lucky to be allowed to live at all.

Oh yes -- the Oath spell can be simulated in AD&D by one or more Quest
and/or Geas spells.

_______________________________________________
Tim Maroney, duke!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@udel-relay (ARPA)