Sacrifices Part 3

So you were starting to think that we weren’t going to actually tell you what the benefit of sacrifices were, huh?  Tease in Part 1 but deliver in Part 3.  That wasn’t a ploy.  (We don’t think that far ahead.)  But telling you the benefits without leading up to how and why they work wouldn’t have worked for you anyway.

Why wouldn’t that have worked?  Well, mainly because just going through the motions doesn’t work.  If you want to get something of value from a divine, you need to give them what they want (even the good ones).  But if you just fake it and go through the motions, well, chances are they won’t get what they’re after, so neither will you.

We went through all that junk about eggs in Part 2 because they are important.  One of our favorite ways to deliver stuff from the gods is through the sacrifices.  For example:  Mage prays really hard to his god, one of the many trickster gods.  He wants a fireball spell.  Prays really hard.  The god gets him a message (dream, angel, whatever) and tells him to get the egg of a wyvern and do a sacrifice ritual.  (You know as a mage, he might just find the ritual in an old spell book - seemingly by accident.  The gods never do anything by accident.)  He gets the wyvern egg, does the ritual and the last act of the ritual is to smash the wyvern egg with his hand.

The egg smashes, and out pops a miniature dragon, named Fireball.  Remember, it was a trickster god.  But, the mage now has a portable flamethrower, though not as powerful as he wanted.  Maybe it is also a familiar and grants those benefits.  Maybe it has other benefits.  But it is also a servant of the god.  It is a spy and a tattletale.  Anything it sees will be relayed, or maybe only if it is important.  This could be good or bad for the mage as his god is now keeping a close watch on him.

This seems a silly example, but it is along the lines of what can work great!  You sacrifice a marble egg to the god of strength and it hatches into an earth elemental.  Maybe it needs to feed on stuff in order to grow into a big earth elemental, but it can grow.  Carve all sorts of holy symbols into an emu’s egg, then sacrifice it to your harvest god, and a rain cloud hatches to bring rain to your drought hampered farm.  Any time a god is sending something divine into the mortal world, it expands the god’s powers and abilities.  This means that they are often happy to send symbols of their power to their followers.

There are an unlimited number of gods, and they all act in different ways.  So without copping out, we cannot cover every possible outcome of praying to the gods for something, but more often than not (like 99% of the time) the answer from the god is no.  Well, more like 98% of the time there is no answer, and 1% no, and 1% yes.

The common fiction result of the evil god granting the mortal hero or villain massive cosmic powers doesn’t work well.  Sure, it’s what the players want for their characters, but what’s in it for the god?  If the god has any chance of not fully controlling the character, then this would be a huge mistake.  Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the character could spoil plans the god set in place generations ago.  This is one of the reasons that gifting a “helper” works nicely.  They are entirely controlled by the god.

But this helper doesn’t need to be as flashy as a mini dragon or earth elemental.  Perhaps the helper that hatches out of one of the eggs is an angel - a really low powered angel that is invisible and doesn’t do much.  What can it do?  Well, what’s important to the god?  Its job may be to carry the character directly to heaven or hell immediately upon dying.  Its job may be to report on the character’s morality.  Its job may be to sit on the character’s shoulder and give advice ala his conscious.  These are the things that a god wants.

They are not entirely useless to the character either, at least not all of them.  The Valkyrie whisking the soul off to Valhalla should prevent a character from falling prey to soul sucking weapons.  The tiny conscious on the shoulder could offer good advice about morality, but also have vast knowledge of divine and demonic creatures, and thus give advice about defeating them.

But the players want more for their characters.  But what do they bring to the party?  Well, if they are bringing in some pretty awesome stuff, they might be well rewarded.  But rather than simply handing out magical items, gods seem more inclined to hand out knowledge and experience.  No this is good; we’re talking about handing out character points, experience points, whatever your game mechanic is.  And or handing out knowledge.  This could be a skill they didn’t have before, or a spell, or the location of a hidden treasure.  This hidden treasure bit is sort of a self-perpetuating thing, because the god probably wants something that has been lost with that treasure.  So go find the treasure, sacrifice something, and get a new quest (shopping list) from your god.

The knowledge absolutely can be role-playing oriented though.  Does a character need to know who his parents where?  or where his lost sister is?  or why the bad guy hates him so much?  These work too!  So do prophesies, though those are always difficult to work with in a game campaign.

Let’s turn the tables and return to the original goal of this now series of posts:  Why do evil high priests sacrifice people and things to their evil gods?  Mainly because they want more power.  How do they get that?  Well, the new spell for a major sacrifice sounds kind of appropriate, especially if it works along with the god’s tool and possibly even serves as a sacrificial rite in and of itself.  But here again, this gift of an ally seems perfect.  The EHP burns three rival priests in a ceremony and a shadowy, flaming demon is released from the pyre.  This demon is mostly under the control of the EHP, until he’s not under control anymore.

I’m not always good at giving examples that everybody understands, so let me throw at least this at you:  Remember the first Hellboy movie?  Did anyone think the little monkey with the rock hand was dangerous when he showed up?  But he turned out to be pretty cool, didn’t he?  Maybe your players need some of that - They don’t think they got what they asked for from their god, but they probably did, or they did if they remain patient.