ForgetsOldName wrote:Liquidmark wrote:
I believe that the goo was to show who had a chief or not. It wasn't to determine who should be a chief. A simple test like that shouldn't hold sway over whether or not Dies should be chief.
That's definitely what the text implies, but TBH it would make more sense if it had made him a chief. "If your chief is dead, your hand will glow!" Huh? At best it's a test to see if someone is eligible to be a chief, but nothing we've been told makes it sound like certain goblins are ineligible to be chief.
On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. We are told explicitly that chieftainship is for life. Goblins from any clan with a living chief are therefore not eligible to be made chief of their clan.
The simple "glow" test would have been developed long ago because goblins traditionally send their fighters out into the world under the command of their clan chief, and it surely has happened from time to time that the entire war party including the chief has been slaughtered by adventurers, leaving no survivors to carry the message back to the clan village. If the war party goes out and is never heard from again, this test is how the village can find out that they need to appoint a new chief.
It's not clear whether tellers
always go out with the war party. Young and Beautiful did, though -- so at least sometimes, a village may have to reboot the way the GAP is doing, going through the teller-creation ceremony first. Or, it's possible that tradition also allows a village that is worrying about a long-overdue war party to go to a neighboring village and ask their teller to perform the test.
I'm guessing the social barrier to either of these plans must be pretty high, because it would be really humiliating for a clan to admit, especially to another clan, that they'd lost all hope of their war party returning. (Not to mention, what if the glow test fails, indicating the clan chief is still alive out there? Oops! Oh ye of little faith!) But, eventually, in clans that survive,
need would overcome embarrassment.