Post by Thorulfr on Jun 22, 2009 15:36:11 GMT -6
I've still been poking away at my rules for Wanderer - I've started re-writing Book 1 and converting the rules over a bit at a time; my probably-misguided desire is to create documents that I can print out in landscape format and saddle-staple into booklets like those from that picture from Germany that started this whole thing off. Oddly enough, one of the more difficult parts is trying to match the writing style when adding new material - the Traveller rules are written in a very spare, Hemmingway-esque style with simple, declarative sentences; my own prose is far more convoluted and 19th century (I never met a dependent clause I didn't like)
I'm still pondering the magic rules. In setting up a separate background for the 'Shaman', rather than the 'Temple Priest' or the 'Wizard', it may seem that I am indulging my own predilections (I studied anthropology in college - sometimes it shows). I think it is valid, though - I want Wanderer to be a "toolkit" game, and enable it to create backgrounds and adventures in a wide range of technological levels. It is ludicrous to try to shoehorn 30,000+ years of religious development into one 'class'. The priests of Egypt and Babylon were more akin to the Traveller Supplement 4 'Bureaucrats' than they would be to a D&D 'Cleric', and that set of skill tables would just not work for the main type of spiritual worker that has served the tribes of man since before the last ice age.
If this game had been written by Chaosium, the decision would be a lot easier - Back in the mid 80's, Greg Stafford wrote an article for one of the early issues of the magazine Shaman's Drum about his trip to Glastonbury Tor. But Traveller was not written on the west coast; it was written in the mid-west by a group of (mainly) Vietnam veterans, one of whom was a Roman history buff, and another was fond of putting all the available data on a graph and seeing what trends emerge (I’ll bet Frank Chadwick went nuts when he found out about the ‘Pivot Tables’ feature in Excel.)
So, what would they have used for a reference? My guess is that the 'first edition' of the Shaman would have been based on Carlos Castaneda's work The Teachings of Don Juan, probably the most accessible and popular work on pop-shamanism in the 70's. A more serious reference would be Mircea Eliade's Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
The "Shaman" class in Shadowrun was based heavily on Michael Harner's The Way of the Shaman, but that work wasn't published until 1980, so the "Book 1" version of the Shaman will be patterned after Castaneda, while a "Book 6" expansion could borrow more heavily from Harner's work.
Michael Harner focused primarily on the use of drumming and chant, and the connection to power animals that is evident in the Shadowrun rules; Castaneda's work, on the other hand, was clearly a product of the 60s and focused mainly on the use of ethanogens. In fact, as I read through "Don Juan", it looks like I should be able to adapt at least part of the "Drugs" section from Book 2 without too much difficulty. I can’t let it get too out of hand, though – again, alluding to the ‘cultural differences’ between GDW and, for example, TSR, the sort of goofiness and 70’s drug humor evident in the early issues of The Dragon is notably lacking in JoTAS.
I'm still pondering the magic rules. In setting up a separate background for the 'Shaman', rather than the 'Temple Priest' or the 'Wizard', it may seem that I am indulging my own predilections (I studied anthropology in college - sometimes it shows). I think it is valid, though - I want Wanderer to be a "toolkit" game, and enable it to create backgrounds and adventures in a wide range of technological levels. It is ludicrous to try to shoehorn 30,000+ years of religious development into one 'class'. The priests of Egypt and Babylon were more akin to the Traveller Supplement 4 'Bureaucrats' than they would be to a D&D 'Cleric', and that set of skill tables would just not work for the main type of spiritual worker that has served the tribes of man since before the last ice age.
If this game had been written by Chaosium, the decision would be a lot easier - Back in the mid 80's, Greg Stafford wrote an article for one of the early issues of the magazine Shaman's Drum about his trip to Glastonbury Tor. But Traveller was not written on the west coast; it was written in the mid-west by a group of (mainly) Vietnam veterans, one of whom was a Roman history buff, and another was fond of putting all the available data on a graph and seeing what trends emerge (I’ll bet Frank Chadwick went nuts when he found out about the ‘Pivot Tables’ feature in Excel.)
So, what would they have used for a reference? My guess is that the 'first edition' of the Shaman would have been based on Carlos Castaneda's work The Teachings of Don Juan, probably the most accessible and popular work on pop-shamanism in the 70's. A more serious reference would be Mircea Eliade's Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
The "Shaman" class in Shadowrun was based heavily on Michael Harner's The Way of the Shaman, but that work wasn't published until 1980, so the "Book 1" version of the Shaman will be patterned after Castaneda, while a "Book 6" expansion could borrow more heavily from Harner's work.
Michael Harner focused primarily on the use of drumming and chant, and the connection to power animals that is evident in the Shadowrun rules; Castaneda's work, on the other hand, was clearly a product of the 60s and focused mainly on the use of ethanogens. In fact, as I read through "Don Juan", it looks like I should be able to adapt at least part of the "Drugs" section from Book 2 without too much difficulty. I can’t let it get too out of hand, though – again, alluding to the ‘cultural differences’ between GDW and, for example, TSR, the sort of goofiness and 70’s drug humor evident in the early issues of The Dragon is notably lacking in JoTAS.