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The Eternal Champions

Posted By: SiliconDream =PN= (mates.HIP.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: 3/24/2000 at 4:19 a.m.

Warning: This discussion requires a belief in GURPS. Ares take cover! Or just play along for the fun of it. :-)

So: GURPS suggests that Alric is the reincarnation of the spirit which also manifested as Tireces, Moagim, and Moagim Reborn. Based on the fact that, in that case, every known Great Hero and Leveller is a reincarnation of either Alric or Connacht, some of us--like me--have decided that they all are. The Alric-spirit and the Connacht-spirit embody every thousand years and make war, alternating which one is good and which one is evil.

So my question is--can we know anything above the characters of the spirits themselves, above and beyond the stuff they temporarily take on as appropriate to their Light/Dark alignment for that millennium? What's Alric/Tireces/Moagim's personality like, and Balor/Connacht's?

Here's some stuff that's occurred to me. Alric/Tireces/Moagim is called A, and Balor/Connacht C, for brevity's sake:

A prefers a relatively centralized form of government, as well as a centralized military--he's at the top, and everyone else is in roughly the same level below, all being ruled pretty much directly by him (although there may be an intervening level of minor local lords). We don't know much about how he ran things as Tireces, but this in itself is supporting evidence; apparently he never had any lieutenants or grand viziers or vice-presidents or anything, who were sufficiently powerful or high enough in status to be remembered. As Moagim and Moagim Reborn, the same holds true, and with greater force--if he had any noteworthy subordinates, we really should know about them, since he was a contemporary of the reasonably well-known Connacht. Instead, as far as we know, the Dark forces consisted purely of him and a lot of relatively low-powered units like the Myrkridia. Finally, we have Alric, who doesn't seem to have chosen either a political or a military second-in-command; nor has he recruited new archmages to reconstitute the Nine, formerly the greatest political force in the West after the king himself.

C, on the other hand, prefers to rely on subordinates of considerable power. As Connacht, he was accompanied by his lieutenant Damas from his earliest known period of activity onwards; that faceless guy from the TFL comic is most likely another subordinate, whose political/personal power (best guess is he's an archmage) is sufficiently great to justify his wearing a highly individualistic costume. And as Balor, of course, he was served by the Fallen Lords who did almost all of his fighting for him, as well as numerous Shades, each of whom held the status and personal power of an archmage.

Although A doesn't like to have intermediates in the power structure whose status approaches his, he's quite happy to give his "common subjects" quite a bit of self-government and decision-making capacity, much more so than C. As Moagim, A's most famous deed was the education of the Myrkridia in the art of war, so that they were able to fight effectively on their own without his command, as they amply proved over the next millennium. C, though, preferred as Balor to build the bulk of his army up from mindless undead, incapable of doing anything but randomly attacking the nearest creature unless given specific orders by a controlling intellect. When Balor was killed, most of hs army seems to have simply collapsed on the spot. Again, as Alric A has created a highly self-reliant army whose members are capable of conceiving and executing a highly complex battle plan even when disorganized and cut off from their superiors--a vital factor in the Light's victories in the last two wars, given the number of critical battles fought by small, isolated groups of Light soldiers. (Actually, the vital factor was that the Light was being controlled by skilled players like us. But from a story standpoint, it's the same thing.) We don't really know how C ran his army as Connacht, but I suspect he didn't like to give them too much freedom, which is why almost every great heroic feat of the late Wind Age/early Wolf Age was performed by Connacht himself or Damas; C didn't trust anyone else to undertake important military--uh--undertakings.

A doesn't like horses; C doesn't like Myrkridia. These aren't innate characteristics but ones acquired during the cycles; still, since they've persisted from incarnation to incarnation they seem to be semi-permanent. I suspect A won't have much love for undead after this incarnation. In fact, A may always prefer to use living units and C to use undead, given their acquired tastes and differing opinions on how much freedom their soldiers should be given.

There may be some notable difference on their views on powerful magical artifacts, with A preferring to gather them and make sure they're all safely in the possession of his side, while C prefers to destroy or hide them so that the other side won't get them. But I'm not sure if this can be supported.

So, what do you guys have to add to this?

Oh, and one more thing. A major asymmetry in the cycle is that when a spirit manifests as good and wins, he lives for the rest of the millennium and is then turned, still living, to The Dark Side™; whereas when a spirit manifests under any other conditions he's killed in the Great War and must reincarnate again at the end of the next millennium. But GURPS occasionally seems to suggest that the victorious Great Hero and his lieutenants actually died, after they'd wandered off, and were reborn as the Leveller and Fallen Lords.

Now, could this actually be true? Maybe there isn't this asymmetry after all. Maybe the reason that the Light knows that each successful Leveller was the previous Great Hero, and doesn't (in general) know about the rest of the reincarnations, is that the Great Hero's so famous and well-known that his appearance and personality are easily recognized when he comes back--and this recognition helps the Leveller to quickly realize who he once was. The Hero before him, who failed, doesn't live long enough to become well-known, so no one figures it out when he comes back; the Levellers aren't at all well known to the Light, so no one figures it out when they come back. Only the successful Great Hero-->successful Leveller transition is obvious to Light scholars, except for a few of the most erudite.

Far-fetched? Whaddya think?

--SiliconDream

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