From: Kathy Ryan Subject: Re: Oracle Newsgroups: alt.games.whitewolf Date: Thu, 07 Nov 1996 06:36:25 -0500 Organization: White Wolf Reply-To: netsphinx@white-wolf.com Path: news.kth.se!eru.mt.luth.se!news-stkh.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!newspump.sol.net!news.mindspring.com!usenet Lines: 28 Message-ID: <3281C9B9.2765@white-wolf.com> References: <5589k5$e8b@newsbf02.news.aol.com> <50.52859.2177@freddy.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.245.93.33 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Server-Date: 7 Nov 1996 11:26:01 GMT X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.01 (Macintosh; I; PPC) First off: I agree with all these versions of Ascension. I've got one more way to explain it, based on a real-life belief central to Buddhism. Say you go sit under a tree and stay there until you really, -really- understand the nature of the universe, the cycles of life, the purpose of mankind, yourself, and all the lesser gods. You realize that you are becoming one with the whole of creation and its creator, the greater god. You get about halfway to heaven, and you take one last look back at the earth and your old life, and you see that you brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, etc. are miserable. They can't understand what's happening to them, why they die and are reborn and die again ‹ stuck like blind men naked in a briar patch. You decide to put off going to heaven for just a bit, until lots of your fellow men can go with you. This is how Buddhists explain the boddhisatvas (forgive me the spelling and oversimplifications). This works pretty well for explaining Oracles in Mage. They've reached ultimate understanding of the universe, and they decide to stick around instead of joining with their creators. (Lucky for us at the White Wolf offices, who'd be pretty damn embarrassed if they did show up!) Second: So far as I know, the reason we don't have Anders writing for us is that we need SOMEONE objective to review our books on the net, and hiring him would kinda create a conflict of interest. Kathleen Ryan