A little background

[muckefuck]

At 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]".

Comments

[bunj.livejournal.com]

Why, after swallowing the sun, was he the one to replace it? Seems he'd have a belly full of sun, and no urge to put one back in the sky. Of course, I could see some other god poking him until he vomitted up the sun again (what's Cheirdic for 'sun-vomitor'?). What I think may be cooler s if a Daedalus-analog builds the new sun. He could be the mechanic of the celestial spheres, fixing them when some unruly god eats, or burns, or pushes something out of the sky.

BTW, I was pleasantly surprised when I started looking more closely at the Greyhawk gods. They're actually several interwoven pantheons. Here's a site for the Suel Pantheon (albeit with RuneQuest stats). Lendor reminds me of the Finnish Ukko for some reason: http://talmeta.net/runequest/greyhawk/gq-suel.pdf

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

what's Cheirdic for 'sun-vomitor'?

Why Heliemeto:r!

The story gets a little complicated. You see, the Nithians originally lived hundreds of miles to the west on a river that terminated in the swamps of S'u:s'u:, which were inhabited by lizardmen, and their religion, like that of most of their human neighbours, was dominated by a solar cult. They got involved in a war of expansion which they ultimately lost, largely due to the lizardmen allying with their enemies. The exiled Nithians were faced with rebuilding their civilisation and coming up with an explanation for why the Sun God had supported their enemies. Since the True Sun would never have done that, they decided he had been devoured and replaced with an imposter and, since their worst enemies were reptilian, they made the devourer reptilian in form as well.

Why would he do that? Obviously, he had to conceal his crime, lest some big bully god seek him out, poke him in the ribs, and make him spit out the sun. Where did he get a new sun? I haven't figured that out yet. Perhaps, rather than a Daedalus, I could have some fiendish fire magician who creates the False Sun with sorcery rather than artisanal skill.

The Cheirides don't buy the conspiracy-theory aspect of the myth. For them, Ho:nas is just a convenient explanation for eclipses. I'm not sure what the exact nature of their sun is anyway, since I recently discovered that I have two completely contradictory mythical explanations. I think I may end up making it the egg of a phoenix-like bird which lays it and is reborn from it daily.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Ukko's also pretty tedious.

It's a nice file, but it exemplifies exactly the problem I have with most fantasy pantheons: They're too straightforward. There has to be a god of luck for thieves and gamblers to pray to, an evil god of undead for necromancers, etc. Compare them to the Greek gods. What isn't Hermes or Apollon god of? Each has so many aspects, it's just dizzying! Sure, thieves and gamblers worship Hermes, but so do merchants, wizards, and herdsmen. And can you imagine another god from a different pantheon who could take over Apollon's portfolio? Yet I could interchange Norebo with a half-dozen other deities without anyone noticing.

[spookyfruit.livejournal.com]

I don't know why I find this funny, but Norebo is Oberon backwards.

[prilicla.livejournal.com]

Our first adventure was the typical you-meet-in-the-tavern-and-raid-the-dungeon-just-outside-of-town scenario

In my first D&D game (which, by the way, was more than 20 years ago, when I was in high school--my God, am I old!) the DM was a future engineer who didn't see the need to mess with garbage like the party meeting and talking to each other. I'm afraid I don't recall the specifics, but I'm pretty sure we started right at the dungeon door and proceeded to hack our way through level after level of unrelated monsters. I still remember being floored by the sophisticated role-playing in my first college game; we occasionally talked in character, and when we did, we actually used the character's name!

Anyway, thanks for the background. I'm impressed that you started thinking about world-building so young and that you've been working on the world for so long.

[prilicla.livejournal.com]

Well, they tried Kcup first, but it just didn't look right.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Now you know where bunj really gets his Pulp Method of Onomastogenesis.

What's suprising to me is that the embarrassingly unsophisticated names I came up with when I first started world building, I've never forgotten. It doesn't matter how many times I've renamed them, will forever haunt me that I once called the Viking-analogues "Raders" and the plainsmen "Panstukka".

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I should've written "you-met-in-a-tavern", since we didn't actually role-play the meeting at all. We basically started out at the gate to the dungeon as well. (Our first dungeon was above ground--at least the first level of it.) It was Mistamere, recently occupied by the evil mage Bargle. GAAH!

[prilicla.livejournal.com]

The evil mage Bargle? Wow, that's painful! On the bright side, it shows how much RPG material has improved over the years, since even the lousiest module-writer today would probably do better than that.

[lifeandstuff.livejournal.com]

In some of my first dungeon crawls, the dungeons were alphabetical since the guy who made the dungeon first drew the map then populated it by paging the monster manual in order. Also, 2 or 3 dragons (of entirely random age with entirely random treasure) could easily fit in a 10 x 10 room.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I remember finding the Random Dungeon Generator in the DMG and thinking it was a lark to roll up senseless, extensive dungeons with random rooms stocked with random monsters and random treasure. Like I said, this was back before I realised that D&D fantasy worlds could have any kind of consistency or logic at all. I had read a friend's Fiend Folio and thought the "Ethereal Plane" was an actual plain somewhere on the bizarre, random world where all this stuff was found.