The Conversation
The really interesting thing here is how the player spent the last few turns setting up a form of ritual magic based around his altars. In this game many players base their civilization on some form of magic. In this case the magic is centered around worship of the god and specifically on his sacred altars. Right now it is very weak but the way he's set up the goundwork these past few turns is impressive.
First he aquired a powerful object, the dead crystal seed, remember on turn one I told him if he got a dead seed he'd better do something good with it. Using it as his primary altar and tying a system of magic to it has lowered his costs for setting up rituals by quite a bit, though the player doesn't realize that. He just thinks it looks cool.
After that mesnoth made the first ritual and specified a few things that seem to apply to this form of magic. It happens at the altar, and the effects don't work outside of his "aura", those limits further reduce his cost for rituals, and while he has to pay an upkeep cost for the magic each turn 1 point will hold for many rituals if he doesn't get too flashy.
Third he made a ritual to make more altars, which will raise the cost of rituals a bit. But as an experienced player he was clever in how he did it. He made the ritual hard, had it require a personal sacrifice from a lot of people, and put limits on it. That helped keep the cost for THIS ritual down by a lot.
I expect that more rituals will follow quickly once the altars are up. From here the sky is the limit for Menthos' priests. This turn we can really see the players strategy starting to come together.
Where Drenthor has been doing big flashy acts that change everything instantly and shock the population into noticing him, we once again see Mesnoth setting things up with one small action after another. Carefully going exactly where he wants over a long period of time. I can hardly wait to see what he does next!