Damn. Am like 20 pages behind and will never catch up, but... I've been seeing that a lot of the circular discussion topic has been around "The gods will notice!" "No they won't." "Doing this is disrespectful to Ranald!" "Ranald probably knows anyway." "This is taking knowledge from the gods that we shouldn't be taking!" "So what, they voyeuristically spy on humans all the time anyway, isn't this just getting even?"
To... sort of edge around those arguments, I think the issue isn't just something like 'Is doing this disrespectful to Ranald and/or to gods in general?' or 'Wait, would the Gods notice if we take tiny crystals of their energy?'
The issue is, as the update said, that this is "a declaration of war against the secrecy of the Gods and the Cults."
Meaning, the issue will be that
in order to progress this research, you have to go into the places of knowledge and worship of the Cults, and steal knowledge from them that they won't even realize you are taking from them.
And the question is: is
that an okay thing to do? To the Gods
and to the Cults of humans?
We won't just be doing something presumably/arguably transgressive against Gods, we'll also be treating the Cults -- of Verena and Ulric and Sigmar and Loec and Hoeth -- as knowledge-pinatas. (Or, alternatively, we only target the Kurgan Moon God and Gunndred and Khaine and Gork and Hashut with this. In which case, well, that's a hazard of an entirely different sort.
) (Or we target ancient or dead or foreign gods, play archaeologist, or something else.)
But, like.
Do you want to look at the culture and history and the relationship that humankind has had with the gods, and go "Yeah I'll just take knowledge from you that you aren't realizing you are giving."
I mean, I'm pretty sure the answer to that for some people is going to be "Well of course. It gets us knowledge and we can use that knowledge" and "and nobody is
really being hurt by it" and so on. But, well, still. That "a declaration of war against the secrecy of the Gods and the Cults" part of Boney's post comes to mind anyway.
Though, we don't necessarily have to go too far or target good gods. But then in that case, we aren't exploring the Truth option to its furthest exactly. Which might be frustrating to the Truth voters in a different way.
That's one reason why I voted for the Faith option. Because it felt more palatable to be. And because I wanted to see what the Faith choice involved I guess. As it's a mystery box and I want to see what is in it.
