...it just gets more and more tiresome to the 99% of you who don't believe it.
But too bad. I've had more thoughts. Having more or less satisfactorily explained to myself why, at the end of Light Ages, the Leveller always chooses the previously successful champion instead of the new guy--a, the elder champion is more successful and b, over the years his order/chaos affiliation has become more extreme and so it's easier to exaggerate that even more and push him over the edge into madness--I've been trying to figure out why, at the end of Dark Ages, the Leveller always chooses the champion with the same order/chaos affiliation as the Age now ending. I've come up with two possible reasons.
First, this champion is easier to corrupt, just as the elder champion was a thousand years ago; because he was born and raised in an Age whose affiliation matches his innate inclinations, his attitude is already more extreme than that of his rival, whose nature is balanced by the external influence of the Age he grew up in. Second, having the same affiliation as the Dark forces already in power makes that incarnation of the Leveller more adept at wielding them in battle--though of course he loses anyway.
Now, I was also thinking that each Leveller employs combat methods designed to defeat Light forces of the same order/chaos affiliation. Balor uses great masses of slow but unstoppable undead; they're great at flattening cities and trampling armies, but there's not much they can do against a mobile and all-terrain enemy. Indeed, he couldn't have done half as much damage (except personally, through his magics) as he did if the people of the West were nomadic rather than city-living, and could simply move out of the way of his armies at will. On the other hand, Moagim employed fast but fairly uncoordinated Myrkridia who could annihilate small bands or tribes of humans, but who had little effect on large, walled cities with well-planned defenses.
This could reflect a lack of imagination on the part of the Leveller, something like what Dave was positing--each Leveller assumes the Light fights as he himself would if he was in the same position--but it could also be intentional on his part. After all, what's the outcome? If the Leveller wins, the world remains in its current order/chaos affiliation; but if the Leveller loses and the Hero survives, the Light societies will have moved, and will continue moving, toward the Hero's affiliation simply because that allows them to more effectively combat the Dark forces of the age. For instance, the Wolf Age was an orderly era of cities and empires not only because it was run by order-affiliated Connacht but also because cities and empires are much better at dealing with Krids than nomadic tribes, and so they tended to survive during the Wind Age. Similarly, the modern Legion is more free-wheeling in its operation than it was back before the Great War, because a freer and more unpredictable fighting style turned out to work well against Balor's army.
So what the Leveller is doing is exaggerating the order/chaos orientation of each Light-Dark 2000-year period--its Light societies are impelled toward that orientation not only by the influence of the reigning champion but also by the perceived need to mount an effective defense against future Dark attacks of the same sort as that the last Leveller. Why would the Leveller wish to do this?
Yet again, two reasons. First, the by-now-standard extremists-are-more-easily-possessible argument--the more external influences impelling the reigning champion toward an extreme orientation, the better. Second, the Leveller may hope to make the ages more and more extreme over time--each Leveller becomes more rabidly order-loving or chaos-loving than the last, and each Great Hero and the allied Light societies under his banner turn farther to the opposite pole in defense. In the end, the Leveller might hope to make the polarization so extreme that even the Light societies are Dark; in their zeal to distance themselves from and combat the "Dark" enemy, they'll completely unbalance themselves and forget all rules of moderation and morality. At that point, the Great Cycle would become nothing more than a group of order-obsessed psychos battling a group of chaos-obsessed psychos, with ethics and quality of life gone out the window; an ideal situation from the Leveller's point of view, perhaps. As s/he/it sees it, the most important thing in the world might be clarity, the resolution and differentiation of a grey universe into black and white, with none of this wishy-washy half-order half-chaos "balance" crap. The Leveller might consider s/he/itself a--um--cosmic therapist, duty-bound to bring out in every living creature its uncompromising essence. S/he/it doesn't care what side you take, but you gotta take one or the other.
**Special Bonus Discussion Item!!**
Is it just me, or are the Mauls in GURPS and the pre/postgame pics a *lot* bigger and meaner-looking than the ones in-game? People have been remarking on this with the Krids for a long time, but it just struck me even more strongly with the Mauls. Are they just stooped over too much for their real size to be apparent, or are they actually smaller in-game than they should be?
--SiliconDream
