Scraping Chohwora off the wheel

We've seen some bad, bad names. But some just defy imagination. Today, I'm perusing the biography of a chief from Delta State in Nigeria whose birth name was Ukomomwonmwonchohwora which means "may my womb not host an evil foetus". Seems his mother had seven miscarriages before he was born. I mean, it's great that he has such a meaningful name, isn't it?

Of course, the Urhobo are not an impractical people, so for ease his name was shortened to "Chohwora". I don't know anything of Urhobo grammar, so I can't say what this chunk represents. Is it "foetus"? "evil foetus"? "may it not"? "womb of mine"? Did this name even stand out at school? Or was "Foetus" the "Jason" of Egini High?

The imperialist chauvinists at the Church Missionary School called him "Wilson".

(no subject)

Last night, I gave bunj a ring for his birthday and was rewarded with a run-down of rollick's Demon one-shot. I had considered applying for a spot (good thing I didn't given how exhausted I was on Monday), so it was reassuring to hear that everything went well: Up to a point.

I think bunj has a firm grip on what's wrong with White Wolf games when he describes this (and Vampire) as a superhero game without superhero morality. When I last played supers, beating the enemy to a pulp was not the challenging part. Doing it without losing my humanity in the process was--and my character was a Christian who fought alongside an angel! The interesting part of a game like Vampire should be how one deals with the loss of one's own humanity. If you start out an amoral beast, then it just becomes Grand Theft Auto with blood-sucking.

It's harder to give demons a grounding in human morality since, by definition, they were never human. Nevertheless, it's still possible (and, IMHO, desirable, unless your idea of a fun evening really does consist of brutalising nuns and massacring zealots).

Back when I was researching Islam for a character I was playing, I discovered an interesting strain of heretical thought that sought to rehabilitate Iblis (the Muslim counterpart of Satan). In the accepted Qur'anic account, Allah commands him to bow down before His newest creation, Adam. Iblis refuses, on the grounds that he's composed of divine light and this creature is made of mud. So he gets the boot and spends the rest of his existence spitefully tempting Adam's descendants to evil acts. In the alternative view, Iblis says he will bow down before the perfected Adam, but not Adam as he stands. Once exiled, he devotes himself to the perfection of mankind through any means available--and this naturally includes offering him temptation at every turn.

This isn't exclusively a Muslim concept. The German author Stefan Heym used it in his novel Ahasver (which I may have mentioned here before) to make the title character a more complex and dynamic figure than just a Jewish shoemaker cursed by Jesus to wander the earth. There are also legends in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions of fallen angels who--rather than going to hell--stayed on earth to share their advanced knowledge with mankind. It's possible to interpret their motives cynically--weren't they just trying to get back at God? Did they teach men secrets that would aid them or only increase discord and destruction on earth? But it's more interesting, particularly from a role-playing point-of-view, to take a positive view.

There would still be plenty of room for bad behaviour in such a game. All it takes is an end-justifies-the-means orientation. So what if thousands die, as long as those who survive are better as a consequence. (More or less the ethos that underlies most rogue cop dramas, n'est pas?) Harsh as this is, it beats a moral universe in which there is no special place for humanity and they are, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a source of gruesome amusement.

Combining this with the "new myths" lhn told several of us about recently produces a really interesting setting. Who wouldn't want to join a plucky band of street kids in their desperate ploys to make their home safe from the depredations of Bloody Mary? (And with a police force as corrupt as Dade County's, it would take supernatural assistance to put things right.)