Post
by ChrisDDickey » Tue Mar 17, 2020 3:32 am
Anybody and everybody is vulnerable on the road, yes. Yet once again, there is a difference between you being doomed if you meet a horror in the wilderness, and you doing something that other members of your community refuse to do because they know that it is a danger to their entire community. One is a personal risk you choose to take. The other is risking your entire community for something that benefits you, but not your community. Huge difference.
Also, for a horror, operating in communities is dangerous, even for powerful and subtle horrors. You never can tell when a group of powerful adventurers are going to show up and ruin your carefully laid plans.
But if a powerful and subtle horror can get some fool to open a magically vulnerable link to an entire life-rock, or exert its influence through an existing link... Much, much safer. An entire community to eat, and the horror does not have to be physically touching the rock, nor go to the trouble to infect/corrupt the population one by one. Inject its corruption directly into the liferock though your corrupted thread, and start feasting.
Again, yes horrors can and do infect whole communities of non-obsidimen. But the lore seems to say that Obsidimen have reason to think that an Obsidiman making a Blood Oath is a particular and specific risk to his liferock. Since there are horrors looking for feasts, you don't want to be the easiest of prey. You want to be more troublesome than the feast is worth so that it will go elsewhere looking for the easy meal.
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I am going to respond to the obvious criticism before it is asked. I don't have anything to support the following, I am just taking as stated that Obsidimen are more wary than usual about blood oaths, and make up one possible explanation for why.
Criticism: But if horrors can infect a liferock through an individual members link to it, can't it just grab any Obsidiman and infect the whole liferock. Why would blood oaths make a liferock more vulnerable?
Obsidimen are connected to their liferock. The lore states that if a liferock is damaged, destroyed, or corrupted, the Obsidimen from that liferock also suffer similarly. However that aspect of the relationship seems to be one-way. Corruption to a liferock corrupts its members. Corruption to members does not normally corrupt liferocks.
However blood oaths form a newer, bigger, wider connection between the Obsidiman and some other pattern. This 2nd pathway is a two-way path, and strength flows both to the member, and from the member to all other members. It is not inconceivable that this new pathway in some manner affects the connection an Obsidiman has to his own liferock, and allows corruption to be injected through himself to his liferock.
Again, I have no support for the above, I merely present it as one of the possible explanations for why Obsidimen are wary about blood oaths. I don't say "I don't understand why this should be so, so therefore it is not so". Instead I say "what is a possible explanation for what has been stated as being so, being so". There are many other potential explanations if one cares to imagine them.
Last edited by
ChrisDDickey on Tue Mar 17, 2020 11:21 am, edited 1 time in total.