The ability to "rhetoric" around the ritual by not actually lying has a couple flaws:

1) It pre-supposes that the liar understands the limitations of the ritual.
2) It assumes "god" could be tricked so easily

If one understood the functions and limits of a spell one could perhaps "rhetoric" around and avoid actually triggering it.

The divine are completely unlimited in what they can do and how many ways they could accomplish it. Their actual limitation is that they do it in a way that costs the least effort and that doesn't prove their existance.

That gives the GM unlimited ways to handle it how he thinks is most approprite but offers the tricky target no advantage in trying to trick their way out.

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A Priest able to cast truthsense likely has ritual 61+ the Archbishop 86+.

Assuming a -5 EML per circle over the first truthsense EML ranges from 50 to about 80 tops...


Even assuming that the gods exist and the priest in question could ever actually cast a ritual that would be answered by a higher power stageplay, the fear of divine retribution and the honor of men have to carry the rest.

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One way rhetoric could help might be in this case.

Not having access to the truthsense ritual the king's priest creates the scene as if he did. They call the guy up, swear in the name of, we will know if you are lying...

Someone with high rhetoric might realize that the priest isn't what he says he is / or doesn't have the power he claims and thus avoid breaking down in front of the court spilling his secrets fearing divine punishment.

AND don't forget that lying to the king and being called out by the truthteller is certainly going to get you some time in the King's torture chambers followed by some really "medieval" punishments for lying and whatever you did wrong in the first place. So being able to keep your cool and lie convincingly under that kind of pressure would be amazing rhetoric.

Even being able to calmly tell the truth would be beyond many. Lots probably end up in the torture chambers just for looking really guilty.

It is not like everyone on the street has access to truthsense or that it is used in every conversation. If you are running around in circles where that could be an issue intrigue and rhetoric would likely to be keeping from being pulled up in front of the king for that kind of inspection or talking your way out of it.

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Thinking of the various ways a priest using truthsense could be clued into that the person isn't telling the truth.

The room could seem darker to the and the liar's speech sounds like it is coming out of a deep well (or from a dark abyss).

A torch in the background behind the liar's head could briefly spark up calling the priest attention to the flaw in the lie. Or making it look like his words are the tongue of a flaming serpent.

The liar could actually be struck by lightning. (I'd call that a lie! Now off to the torture chamber! "No! Wait! the truth is bla bla bla." Thanks, that helps a lot but you are going to the torture chamber anyway...)

The fear of god could actually ensure that no one dares lie in the future requiring less attention and effort from the god overall.

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Nope.

Canon is 100% clear on this. The numbers you mention are MINIMUM levels for the rank. It is stressed in Canon that the skill levels of junior clerics can FAR exceed the 'minimum' score for their rank. (One can also suspect that the 'minimum' rule is also flexable when politics comes into play......).

By Canon, a common Priest can have a ML over 100 and be only mildly unusual.

The thing about Truth Sense is while useful (during negotiations or giving a factual account of something important for the priest to cast it based on the default piety casting rules which basically limits a priest to several miracles a year at 30 Piety points a month) it would probably only apply to religious courts and very important cases to the parties involved, because priests being human can and do lie along with stretching the truth or shading the facts to facilitate a political solution.

Unless casting a Zone of Truth Spell Effect that affects everyone and can be sensed by All the the affected with the importance of Clan Law and vouching of neighbors (personal reputation of the witness or person giving testimony). The weakness of the spell is if one actually believes they are telling the truth when they are not because they are under the effect of something like a Savoryan Spell or psionic effect.

Some religions might be able to summon Divine Servants to vet important testimony like the King really did acknowledge that commoner as his bastard son and heir, despite the Herald disappearing and the paperwork getting lost.

Sigh. HârnMaster rules aren't part of Hârnworld canon! And more important, rules are designed as an administration tool for GMs wanting to entertain players in an adventure game, not as a perfect model of an alternate fantasy reality. The map isn't the territory, and game rules aren't laws of physics (or metaphysics, in the case occupying us).

Now, back to the subject of priestly thruthsayers, IMC the results of that invocation are just as reliable as are current lie detectors machines. Which is to say, experienced or pathological liars, psychopaths, masters of self-discipline, etc., might be able to spoof the results, specially if it fits the plot.

For instance, I'm reminded of a passage in a 18th century confessor's manual which basically taught how to safely lie without it being a sin at all; IIRC one had to subvocalise some reservations when uttering the lie, which somehow made it OK with God because He could always hear you even if no one else could. Now, methinks back on Kèthîra in churches where the invocation Thruthsense is available (Sávè-K'nôr, Laráni, Peóni, Sárajìn and Siém according to HMG) such advanced moral gymnastics might be developed too (in terms of skills, Intrigue and/or Rhetoric seem appropriate to represent such techniques).

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«Fair is what we see, Fairer what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in veil.»
—Nicolaus Stenonius

Canon is also pretty clear that rituals may not work at all and that even if they do it may only be the exceptional priest that can even use them.

So if every acolyte in your campaign has truthsense and a ritual ML of 100+ that's kinda what your problem is...

"Properly administered" the world of Harnmaster should resemble midieval times - right down to that not every priest can whip off a ritual with 100% expectation of the Divine answering.

YCMV

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Technically I think they are minimum levels to properly "qualify" for the rank. Not only are there priests with higher skills that don't achieve the rank but there are probably priests who get the rank though they don't properly qualify (and/or are faithless pedophiles, undercover impersonators from other faiths, etc).

I actually don't see the "King's Truthsayer" as a professional priest with a political appointment as a "high piety, ritual 100+ , god would actually answer" type.

OTOH the Archbishop... him I might fear lying to.

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I would not say canon is real clear about that. This seems to fall more in the "optional interpretations of the rules" category

Another "option" mentioend is that the gods do not exist. Not that I play it this way - but again, the gods not existing are a possible "allowed" interpretation per canon.

Castlemike wrote:



I kind of agree here, that truthsense will not be used in every minor situation. However if there is suspected intrigue against the king, this would certainly not be considered "minor" by any means.

And I'd hate to see any intigue against the King ferreted out by use of truthsense. It would make things rather boring.

I like the idea of an opposed roll, perhaps rhetoric, maybe even spirit suggested earlier on this thread by someone, if anything just to make the truthsense less certain.

And I would think also that results of CF's could mean the person IS telling the truth, but the truth sensor thinnks they are lying.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

It is a little more direct than that. Like being the fist paragraph in Harnworld under "Religion". As in:
Step 1: decide whether or not the gods are real or imaginary.
Step 2: whichever way you decide present it as if they did because


But that is HarnWorld - Harnmaster does seem to accept the existance of the gods but even there is is specifically low key. Maybe it is partly personal preference on my part but I always got the impression that not only in HarnWorld but even in HarnMaster that the gods and Shek-P'var were so low key that one could easily have magic and rituals non-functional and have the same game world.

The 13 rules on the gods suggest as much and discussions on "the introduction of a 'Fly'" spell - and probably dozens of others.

While turning up the juice so that gods and magic are visibly seen to have effects in almost anything is well within the option of the GM -- anything is within the option of the GM. But in doing so it is not unexpected that it can introduce problems. (Priests that are not faithful become impossible, the Solari Cursade/Genocide becomes difficult to explain, court intrigue becomes impossible as all priests are wandering lie detectors.)

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I believe the basic difference between humanoids and deities is that humanoids have souls but deities are souls. A human soul is limited by it's material body, and it's physiological, psychological and sociological needs. There is a vast gap between human understanding and deity's understanding, and many concepts have evolved to build bridge over this gap.

A deity doesn't need priests but society does. There were shamans before civilization because men couldn't understand will of gods. So they created special class to take care of the problem. If there are master hunters, master fishermen, master craftsmen - there must be people who can gain excellence in speaking with gods, right? Deities understood this need and played along.

Invocations are formal language between clerics and a deity. The form is actually meeningless to the deity, but it's highly relevant to clerics. Deities don't keep track of the piety points either, but humans do. If a cleric feels himself unworthy to heal anybody, he can't heal anybody.

Temples are build for the glory of deities, but deities themselves don't care. It's societies who need religious landmarks.

Hey, I decided to dig around in the old harnlist archives for anything Robin might have said on the subject and one of the first e-mails was pretty much on topic.

But rather than using the information I got fancy and converted the 117MB harnlist archive to a 0.9MB archive of Robin's posts - available now here:
http://bellsouthpwp.net/g/a/garyashburn ... _ROBIN.txt

(have fun)

Oh, the original info that was sort-of on this topic:





When he says *through* and "being a 'worthy conduit' for divine power" I don't get the impression that he is saying that the priest is necessarily a channel but just that doing ritual miracle obviously gives the priest a status in the eyes of the observers as being worthy to be god's instrument: "a *pious* person... worthy to do the work of the deity".

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Interesting stuff, Feanor.

It would seem that this would make priests not automatic lie detectors - for that matter, even gods are not lie detectors -



That falls in line with powers of the Greek gods. There are myths where a human has sucessfully withheld the truth from a god. This would suggest the Harnic Gods seem to have the powers or be on a similar power level to the greek gods.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

Another e-mail from Robin suggested that even in a campaign that the GM had decided the gods didn't exist tracking Piety Points and even (at least appear to) to get divine intervention.

One way he suggested would be the person's own faith in the divine could be so intense that he psionically creates his own divine intervention.

It also made me think that with/without the gods a person might tap into the pool of faith from other worshipers to, as a group, create the effect. Which would be functionally similar to the god tapping into the pool of faithful worshipers to achieve the effect. The main difference I see being the intercession of an intelligence guiding the effects as they desire. If the god were not involved the group faith might effectively respond to anyone able to tap into it as a new form of magical power rather than the miracle it is described as. Alternately a group faith pool could be a group intelligence, in effect, creating a god as envisioned by the worshipers and responding as such by handing down divine favors where appropriate.

(Continuing in that direction could begin to resemble a number of books I can think of where the gods, magic and even esoteric creatures of the world are side effects of a large group of latent espers sharing a common belief as told to one another in oral tradition - and in so creating their fantasy.) [Godsend, A Warlock in Spite of Himself]


However, IMC the gods do exist as individual entities. Worshipers that pray to them and end up feeding the faith pool are ethically aligned. (OTOH some of the evil gods derive their faith pools from worshipers by exploiting their fear of the god. I suppose the "worshipers" in those cases have surrendered their will and faith to appeasing the god, even if they don't know that is what they are doing, and are thus empowering them to do more.)



While the above quote might be true for in game purposes it is kind of opposite the intent of this thread.

I suppose in most of the scenarios though the "role of the priest" and the effect to the viewers remains much the same.

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There's a line I like from the Matrix series - it's one of the lines of the Merovingian. It the " everything occurs due to cause and effect, and that there is no such thing as choice" line, which he repeats a few times.

I like this idea for any tinkering with a rules system, or even looking at an existing rules system. If you change X, then B will happen.

With an invocation such as truthsense, working as the way the rules do, anyone with access to a high ML priest can find out the truth in most situations. I think this is very unbalancing and would greatly change the world from what he have today, what we have had in history, and would even greatly change the way Harnic history has unfolded.

Making it nowhere near automatic, and with a lack of preciseness makes less great changes in the way Harnic history would seem to run.

Another invocation is the heal invocation. With this, anyone again with acess to a decent ML priest could have an almost unlimited lifespan, though their life might be much like driving a 30 year old clunker with 250,000 miles on it, it's constantly breaking down (but can usually be repaired).

Some might say these techniques are being used to keep old frail Migananth around

But in all seriousness, I like to greatly reduce the effects of any healing spell, invocation, or similar because of this, to where they can aid and hasten natural healing, even bump up the multiplier a few points, but not quite the results the canon healing invocation gives.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

A few of my own thoughts on how "truthsense" SHOULD work:


Not effective on politicans, Lawyers, etc. Not because the ritual does not work. It works fine. The politican is lying. I can tell. His lips are moving.
Joking aside, ANY use of the ritual on such characters would have at best limited value, because they exist in a sea of compromise, back room deals, etc. Trying to seperate the 'lie' from the sea of deceptions that the Lawyer lives from day to day would be difficult. Even when the lawyer tells the bald truth in court, truth sense would be murky (for it to be non-murky, not only would the lawyer need to tell the bald truth, but ALL his motives for telling it should on public display AND purely honest....)


To really get fully effective use of the ritual would require the Priest to know the motives of the speaker and/or the speaker to have a HIGH degree of self-honesty about his own motives, and then to state said motives HONESTLY. A priest would need some skill in what we today would call Psychology. Squeezing good information out of unwilling subjects would be 'difficult'. I could see a skilled interrogator (with good skill in psychology) 'breaking down' an unwilling subject to get the subject into a "mental state" where the ritual would work.
(Edit):
Key note: An 'unwilling' subject could include someone who WANTS to to tell the truth to the Priest (perhaps to avoid 'interrogation'), but as long as they have a mental reservation, the ritual would NOT be reliable. To get the ritual to be reliable, the mental reservation must be 'let go' or 'broken'.....

But letting a Priest pop off a reliable lie detector at the drop of hat? Bad idea.

I suppose with a description of the ritual that says "the person doesn't believe what he is saying" there is a lot of room there for certain types of exploitation. I kind of took that as meaning that someone tells you that "the castle was raided by zombies" if he thought the castle was raided by zombies it wouldn't be a lie even if it turned out that the castle was actually having a costume party and he saw some people enter the building in costume. He "believed" it wasn't a lie.

But politicians, madmen, etc who might lie to themselves so convincingly that they no longer recognize whether what they say is actually untrue or who have a twisted world view where the truth is not what other people would think it to be might get by in some cases with the ritual.

Not because they "tricked" the ritual or understood and exploited it's limitations but just because they actually believed what they were saying. Or as in the method macgorgor mentioned:

because he believed that god heard the truth even as he lied to the court and believed therefore that he wasn't lying.

Anyway that direction of attack has a lot more appeal to me than "tricking" the ritual.

Even there I could see the ritual functioning different ways at different times so that sometimes those things might work and sometimes they wouldn't.

A lot of times IMC it is the piety of the recipient of the favor that drives the ritual (healing, blessing) and it matters little sometimes what the priest's piety is as long as the worshiper is in favor. But for a ritual like Truthsense the target's piety is obviously not driving the god's calling him a liar and the priest casting Truthsense actually has to be the one in favor with god, gathering and spending his own piety for a ritual that primarily benefits himself (at least in the case of the King's Truthteller).

That makes it less likely to me for a Truthsense ritual actually take effect in many cases as the priest actually has to be in favor with god himself to a degree that god would care to answer his frequent calls. And more likely that in some cases the King's Truthteller is just calling the lie as he thinks god is telling him.

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