muckefuck | A little background (Reply)

mollpeartree's party, I stunned

bunj with the observation that next Christmas will mark 20 years since our initiation into the sinful world of fantasy role-playing. Two decades of D&D! It doesn't seem like I'm old enough to have a hobby that's continued that long, but that's the undeniable truth.

Our first adventure was the typical you-meet-in-the-tavern-and-raid-the-dungeon-just-outside-of-town scenario, but it was fresh and exciting to all of us. We didn't notice how the DM was stumbling through the preprinted adventure he was reading for the first time and paging around between every die role. A month later,

bunj got the Expert Set for his birthday, which opened up the world of wilderness adventuring to us (not to mention the heights of accomplishment beyond third level!) What was most fascinating to me, however, were the maps. The gamebook laid out the Grand Duchy of Karameikos and environs along with laughably sketchy notes on culture and politics. At some time later, I peaked into the adventure included in the boxed set (at that time, only my older brother was DMing) and discovered another map, which set the Grand Duchy among a dozen or so other fantasy nations.

It was utter Robert Jordan-style world-building, dumbed down for first-time gamers. Each country was simplistically based on some medieval culture--down to which language they spoke--so you had Vikings coexisting with Mongols, Byzantines, and Renaissance Italians. And, yet, it was the first indication I had that the game took place in a setting with recognisable history and politics, instead of the disconected fairy-tale land of the t.v. series.

I started doing historical and linguistic research to give the world some flesh. The more I learned, the more I disliked some of their choices or came up with descriptions of my own I liked better. (For instance, I transformed their Mongol-analogs to Magyar-analogs, since I knew much more about Hungarian and they just seemed to fit better in a basically European-inspiried milieu.) At the same time, we bought each published expansion to the world as it came out and I created my own 24-miles-to-the-hex fold-out map by meticulously copying the maps in each new module onto taped-together sheets of blue-on-white hex paper. I kept reams of notes. Some were on new character classes, magic items, or monsters, but most were on language, culture, and history.

To make a long story short, I never stopped. Even when my brothers and I gave up playing D&D altogether (or so we thought), I kept up working on my chronologies, etymologies, and mythologies. I knew that the world was, at its core, a deeply cheesy one, but I'd altered so much that my creations had taken on a life of their own. Everything I learned in the social sciences, I plowed back into the material. My brothers and I had talked for years of creating our own fantasy world for gaming in, but we never did. I came to realise that I must enjoy rationalising and rewriting someone else's half-baked creation more than starting from scratch. Somehow, complete freedom is too much.

So now the notes sit in folders and stacks in a corner of my apartment and, every once in a while, I get the urge to pull them out and work on another tiny bit. Some years ago, I realised that it doesn't make much sense to have historical gods from Earth on a world that's decidedly not ours and went about creating entirely new interlocking pantheons. I didn't start with any grand plan, I just knew that I wanted to avoid the generic simplistic deities found in a lot of fantasy games on the one hand and just repackaging European mythology on the other. Sometimes, I feel all I've really done is synthesise those two failed approaches. But other times, I look at what I've done and I feel a real surge of satisfaction. This morning, I was rereading notes on my pseudo-Celtic pantheon and I was genuinely pleased with some of what I'd come up with--to the point of having a Did I think of that myself? reaction.

The closest I've ever gotten to presenting this stuff before is a suggestion Monshu had some years back for an online magazine. He would do the formatting, two friends would supply poetry and prose, and I agreed to contribute cartoons. It all came to nothing, of course, but by then--having given up on cartooning--I'd written up a handful of myths into presentable, literary form. I know they're not great--I've read Gaiman and Lord Darcy, I know where the bar is--but just maybe they're good enough that someone besides myself would enjoy reading them.

Just before Christmas, I'd gone back to the mythology of the Greek-analogs (who I call Cheirides). Early on, I decided that the Olympian gods must have displaced the Titans when the Cheirides came to the western continent. As worship of these gods became the official religion, the cults of the Titans were driven underground or survived only among intelligent non-humans. Later, when I dumped the Greek material, I kept the basic scenario, replacing the Titans with the The:rotheoi or "Beast-Gods". I decided that several of them must have been derived from the zoanthropomorphic deities of the evil Egyptian-analog (Nithian) Empire.

So this is how I ended up in the position of having to name a voracious crocodile god in Ancient Greek.

bunj is right that this is too reminiscent of Sebek/Sobk/Souchos and so I've revised him to be indeterminately reptile. (One of the nice things about realistic gods--as opposed to those in Greyhawk or wherever--is that they don't have to have fixed, determinate manifestations.) I spent hours Tuesday night playing around with various ideas, referring liberally to Gardiner and Loprieno for information on Egyptian vocabulary and phonology. Here's the leading candidate:

Cheiridic Ho:nas (stem Ho:nat-). From Late Nithian Ho:n@, Classical Nithian Ha:nit "greedy", verbal root Hnt "be greedy".

I considered participles from the verbal roots Hqr "be hungry", `m "swallow", and sdb, but I didn't like them as much. I also looked at the dual of `rt "jaw", but I couldn't be sure what the vocalisation would be without looking up the Coptic. Because of a legend that he devoured the true sun and replaced it with a simulacrum, he's also known in as He:liophagon "sun-swallower" and perhaps Mastichax "gnasher [of teeth]".