Race or Species: The Humanisation of Monsters
May 26, 2018, 11:11:02 PM
Race or Species: The Humanisation of Monsters
By Jubal
By Jubal
This article is based on some thoughts after a Kalamazoo 2018 panel on problematizing the medievalisms of D&D. It was done as a format experiment; the panel played through a starter-set type game, and the audience then chipped in discussions of what was going on from a medievalist perspective. The main downside to the format was that far too much time was spent with people stating the obvious – for example, that many common monsters have racially coded elements in their presentation, that there's a lot of gender-norms stuff written into pulp D&D settings that doesn't need to be there – and so I don't think people got to use their expertise as effectively on the topic as might have been nice. Nonetheless, one interesting point that came out was on the use of the term "race" to describe the different monsters of D&D.
Of course, in technical terms being a goblin is not merely a race. Goblins, at least in most settings (and we'll use them as our main monster for this article) are a species in their own right, one that looks and acts quite differently to our own. Nonetheless, their presentation in modern literature and gaming has elements pulled in that have their roots in human presentations of race and racial difference. Goblins, like most monsters, are often not permitted the sort of range of personality and characteristics that humans do: they conform to a single social stereotype with consistent markers like dialect, social structure, and social status and attitudes, which are often features of racial power dynamics and demarcations among humans. Of course this is part of the point. Humans, which are variable, always need introduction – monster species do not, meaning they can be deployed much more simply by a GM. This, however, blurs the boundaries of whether we can treat goblins simply as a species. Despite being biologically in a different category to humans, they have a set of archetypal characteristics that we think of as being more "racial" in style.
That there are issues (that is, heavy reflections of real-word power dynamics) with the portrayal of many or most monster species when treated as "races" is fairly uncontentious to suggest. Monster races like goblins often speak in broken, slang-heavy dialects which are heavily coded to suggest lower social status groups, and their appearance and dress codes are often coded through nineteenth to mid twentieth century colonial-era archetypes of colonised peoples. Even for races portrayed more positively, Tolkien's dwarves were, by his own admission, heavily influenced by Jewish culture, a feature which has carried forwards into other settings (note how "dwarf languages" in different settings often include a lot of ks and zs, which originates from Tolkien using semitic languages as a basis for Khuzdul, and how dwarfs often have a lost homeland/disaspora culture in fantasy literature). The implicit understanding that fantasy creatures are races is strong enough that one can write a satirical book about race and racism using them as the archetypes instead of actually races (Terry Pratchett's Thud).
And so we come to the question of how we think about and deal with these issues and handle race in our games, for which there are a number of possibilities. We can accept and underline the current terminology under the assumption that it forms its own, new technical lexicon, we can accept the portrayal of fantasy creatures as races, or we can attempt to break the race-species lock we have in fantasy.
The first option is the simplest, and arguably the one people do anyway – we just accept that "race" has a different meaning in fantasy settings and games that encompasses simplified aspects of both species and culture for narrative convenience, and that this is fundamentally different to the way we use the word "race" in reality. In general, I think this works better than some people tend to expect it to; people are well aware that fantasy and reality differ, and I have a mild scepticism of the school of thought that suggests that, for example, the portrayal of "races" as having inherent characteristics of intelligence or strength or whatever in a D&D game will leave young gamers with the idea that races in human society function similarly (I've heard this contention made, but I'd very much like to see survey/statistical evidence for it and haven't seen any as of yet). The problem with just relying on a lexicon distinction, though, is that it doesn't do anything with the fact that a lot of the material we draw upon as game designers and DMs comes with a weighty historical legacy, one that I think it's unwise to ignore. I think that good writing can solve a lot of these issues – having diverse casts of human characters to help stop the monsters being treated as racial analogues, for example – but handling that well, especially for DMs/GMs who don't have a lot of experience of writing diverse characters, can be tricky too. It might be nice if GM handbooks included some well-written guidance on this sort of area.
A race-centric fantasy setting is another alternative: one in which one more or less accepts that "we're all human" with all that comes with that. The difficulty with this is that doing so requires accepting a level of humanity on the part of non-human enemies in gaming settings that is difficult to sustain whilst still retaining the sort of clear markers of good and evil that pulp-style fantasy settings often rely on to function. If a goblin or an orc is mentally and morally equivalent to a human, it's no longer mentally or morally an easy decision to go and beat a bunch of them up. Certainly one can no longer maintain the "always evil" categorisations of D&D rulebook styles. Modern fantasy works have often started exploring this area – Rich Burlew's goblins suffering from years of slaughter by human paladins, and books looking at things from Orc perspectives – but in doing so, something is both gained and lost from what we can do with fantasy. We lose the ability to present, via fantasy races, our own ideas of what uncomplicated evil looks like, and are forced to present players with a less escapist, less morally simplified view of the beings they live alongside.
Our final option is to more firmly build settings that try to break the race/species connection. The way to do this, in essence, is to provide cultural/racial divisions and a lot more depth within each species you're going to be dealing with. The problem with that is that firstly it's a lot of work, and secondly it risks erasing the contributions and stereotypes in older variants of a particular archetype. If you have orcs, say, that are culturally as varied as humans in their styles, visuals, languages, etc, then you're... in some ways no longer using an "orc" as we've come to know it. This also, I suspect, could risk erasing the contributions of real cultural groups to fantasy archetypes. Diversifying or editing things to the point where one loses these older racial archetypes entirely may absolve a creator from problems around moral complication, but potentially loses clarity in setting design aspects, requiring a much wider, deeper level of world-building before a campaign can begin, that may not be accessible to gamers in more casual settings or indeed gamers who lack the time resources to work on their setting in that way.
I'm not going to come to a "X is the right path, ignore Y" style conclusion for this article – there's too much still to be discussed that I can't get to here, and it's an area that one writer who's not even an experienced DM is hardly a decisive voice upon. I think that there are things to be gained from mentally unpacking the backgrounds to our ideas of race and species though, and working out what we think we mean by use of those words and how they should be reflected in our games.
Axes and Arithmetic 1: Percentages and Probability
April 06, 2018, 09:25:23 PM
Axes and Arithmetic 1: Percentages and Probability
By Jubal
By Jubal
These Chaos Dwarves may not care where their rocket lands, but you might do.
Introduction
I originally wrote this article under the title "Math-hammer" for the now defunct e-zine A Call To Arms, which I ran in 2010 and 2011, and was based at my high school's gaming club, covering wargaming news, the club's internal news, and a wide range of articles mostly covering Warhammer and related topics. As the e-zine is long since nonfunctional, I figured it was time to give some of the articles I wrote a new lease of life, and as such I'm re-publishing this series under the new title of Axes and Arithmetic. It starts pretty basic, but ultimately covers a good deal of A Level mathematics topics including statistics, mechanics, and decision maths in a way that should hopefully be useful to gamers and game designers alike.
Many wargames, ultimately, are games of chance. It's all the luck of the dice. Or is it? The factors that determine whether you'll win or lose are all based, in some way, on probability – if it was pure luck, the game would of course be boring. Instead, it's a case of army composition, picking your fights, and so on. These things (combat calculations in particular) can all be based on simple mathematical tools that can let you work out where you want to be fighting, and can help with factors such as weapon selection going into combats no end. Of course, chances are you guesstimate such things anyway; but have you got the mental distinction between "big choppy axe" and "two little choppy axes" mathematically nailed down? If not, here's how you do it.
Probability and Fractions
A fraction, as we probably all know, is just a representation of a number divided by another number, usually used when the lower number (the denominator) is higher than the upper one (the numerator), and thus the result is less than one. We'll be dealing only with fractions in that normal form, since we're using them to express probability. A probability, put simply, is the likelihood that something will happen. One, or a one hundred percent chance, is a certainty – something that will happen no matter what you do. Zero is also a certainty, but a negative one – whatever you do, that thing will not happen. The numbers in between are probabilities, the higher the more likely.
I'm going to use fractions for this for a simple reason; we're working in sixths almost entirely. Whilst there are lots of possibilities for polyhedrals, and computer game designers can have much freer choice on their random number generators, it's still basically the case that a large percentage of wargaming rolls are done on a humble D6 - a cubic, six-sided die. As such, the probability of many useful numbers or rolls is something over 6. Remember, the probability is the number of possible "good" results. So a 4+ roll succeeds on a 4, 5, or 6; the probability is 3 over 6. If you have the choice between that or a 5+ roll, (5 or 6, probability 2 over 6), you'll obviously go for the 4+, since the higher probability has a higher chance of success. But what about when you have multiple dice rolls to do?
Multiple Rounds
Ok, let's get some gaming into this - we'll be using old-school Warhammer rules as a vaguely representative gaming system. I'm facing an Orc, and I've got the option of attacking with a human swordsman or another human with a flail (we'll keep them singular for now, doing calculations for whole units of different sizes will be a future article). I want to decide which of my two men will take on the beast. The Orc is Weapon Skill (WS) 3, and Toughness (T) 4, with a 4+ Armour Save. My swordsman is WS4, and Strength (S) 3 with a sword; my flailer has WS3, but S5 with his flail.
And here comes the maths. Rolling to hit, the rulebook chart shows us that the swordsman only needs a 3+. That means a 3, 4, 5, or 6 will succeed and the chance is thus 4/6. The flailer needs a 4+, and so only has a 3/6 chance. From here it looks like the swordsman is the better option. However, we still need to factor in the second "To Wound" roll and the armour save. We do this by multiplying across the tops AND bottoms of the fractions. The flailer needs a 3+ to wound, so that's 4/6. We multiply the 4/6 to wound by his previous 3/6 to hit making a 12/36 chance to wound across both rolls. The swordsman now needs a 5+, so 2/6 by 4/6 means he only has an 8/36 chance to wound across both rolls. Because we multiplied both in the same way, as you can see, the numbers are still comparable. Finally, the armour save. Since we want the Orc to fail his save we count as "ours" the scores he fails on. The S5 flail is a high strength weapon that leaves him just a 6+ chance to save, so that's 5/6 chance of him failing, final total 60/216. The sword gives no armour bonuses so the Orc has only a 3/6 chance of failure, final total 24/216. Whilst it's clear already who the better candidate is, remember that you can divide the top and bottom of fractions by the same number to "cancel" them and make them easier to look at, and that to compare 2 fractions at a glance the denominator (bottom number) should be the same. In this case both can be divided by 12; the flail-man has a 5/18 chance (27.8%) of wounding the orc, his sword-armed counterpart just 2/18 (11.1%).
Conclusion
See, we're just one article in and maths can already help kill orcs with a big spiky flail! You can also use exactly this technique for working out the likelihood of causing a wound from a shooting attack, or in reverse for the chance of surviving (not being wounded by) an attack. If you're a game designer, of course, you can work in reverse - work out how likely you want something to be, and then see if your current requirements and die rolls actually facilitate that.
But what happens with multiple attacks, and when you want to know about rolling lots of dice? You can't just add the probabilities, since that could end up with a number like 20/18 if the above flailman had 4 attacks (and probabilities can't be higher than 1). The answer has to be to distribute the probabilities somehow... and that's what I'll be going on to next article. Stay tuned!
This article is part of the Axes and Arithmetic series. You can find part 2 here.
The Bones of Earth 4: Making Maps
March 23, 2018, 11:03:53 PM
The Bones of Earth 4: Making Maps
By Jubal
By Jubal
Whilst the first three parts of "The Bones of Earth" have dealt with features and how to make them realistic, this will deal with some of the first steps towards actually creating a map for a fictional setting, specifically the overall layouts one could go for.
Single Countries
For some condensed settings, you only need a map of a single country, county, principality, island, or similar. Of course this is very setting-dependent, and it risks restricting your room for maneuver if you're literally not going to plan out more than the absolute minimum land area you need, but there's also something to be said for having a neat, compact setting that's proportionally much easier for your reader/user to get their head around. If it's a pre-modern setting you may need to cover for why national borders are where they are. Rivers, mountains, and coasts are all traditional, though in the case of rivers it's also worth remembering that river valleys often grow fairly culturally similar on both sides: maintaining a really hard border down the middle of a valley may not make a lot of sense for the people living immediately on either side. For a map of this scale, you're more likely to want to work out details of settlement and road positioning carefully - something we'll come back to in future articles.
The East-Facing/West-Facing Generic Continent
The principle here is simple; you have the continent on one side of the map, bounded by mountains or an impassable desert or unknown lands, and on the other it's bounded by sea (usually with further desert/mountains in the south and ice/mountains in the north. Examples of this include Narnia, Middle Earth, Calradia (in Mount & Blade), Memory/Sorrow/Thorn by Tad Williams, Guns, Swords and Steam (my RPG), The Inheritance Cycle, Bletsungia (another world of mine), and the list goes on. Europe, the USA, and China can all pretty much fit this in the real world, which explains its popularity partly. Historically having the sea in the west (Tolkien style) seems to be more traditional, though the east (Narnia) isn't uncommon either. I'm not sure I've ever seen a north/south faced variant on this, though I don't see any particular reason why one shouldn't exist.
The advantage of this generic continent style is that it combines a sizeable land area with effective, natural-looking boundaries that prevent characters from needing or wanting to go far beyond the compact setting. This is somewhat unrealistic, of course, but not entirely so - large barriers like the Sahara have historically been difficult for most people to traverse, though it's worth noting that trade still very much existed and that the presence of large mountains or some tundra certainly doesn't mean that you'll end up with ethnic monocultures on either side.
The Archipelago
This is a pretty good alternative to a continent with a particular facing. Earthsea is the most prominent example, though there are large numbers of others. The major advantage of archipelagos is that they allow for very restricted geographical biomes and areas; this is excellent if lots of small political units are desired, or if large variations in wildlife or plantlife are needed in the setting. Of course, the requirement for transport is also a factor; if you want huge tribes of horsemen sweeping across wide open plains they're going to have trouble on a landmass five miles wide. Conversely, if you want naval journeys and warfare to feature in a setting, an archipelago really lets you go to town and make those a major part of your world in a way that's less plausible in more continental settings.
The Central Sea or the Great Plains
These are another two continental possibilities, both probably under-used. A Great Plains setting, with little water and no obvious sea, runs the risk that such areas rarely had much in the way of settled city-based cultures for much of their history. That said, nomads are pretty damn cool, and a setting that had more of a focus on areas where there weren't the resources for larger settlement could work well. A Central Sea setting, with water surrounded by land, is another interesting idea; essentially most of fantasy writing focuses on inland cultures which happen to eventually reach the sea, but a setting where the sea was in itself the major resource needed would mean that the divide between inland cultures and those on the shore (littoral cultures) would become more prominent.
The Planetary Map
A planetary map is a fairly large undertaking, and in many traditional fantasy settings doesn't necessarily make all that much sense – if there's no reasonable way for your heroic queen with her army to get to the other side of the world, there's no need to focus your reader on a ton of places they don't in any sense need to know about whilst losing detail on the places you really want. Nevertheless, for characters going on Marco Polo-like quests or in sci-fi worlds where air travel is easy it can certainly be useful. Generally the number of continents is up to you; you can end up with a bizarre super-archipelago if there are too many. Remember that if there are too few, you probably will end up with some inland seas etc or at least huge deserts in the centre of your vast landmasses. Thinking in plate tectonics terms is far more important at this scale; mountain ranges will go in long lines, ultimately landmasses will border each other at some sort of plate boundary. Looking at maps of prehistoric earth and the different forms the landmasses took is a really good plan here.
Real World Plus
Something I haven't really talked about in the other articles is the fairly obvious fact that you don't need to change the fundamental geography of the real world at all if you don't want to. This can still lead to a number of possibilities – for example, major climatic change, adding wasteland or megacity areas, moving bits of landscape, simply wiping all the cities off the map and putting new ones in instead, etc etc. Sea level rise is an interesting one which can lead to an eerie "familiar yet different" feel for a map, as is the obliteration of large parts of it in nuclear wars. These ideas are used in a lot of sci-fi (Judge Dredd, for example) and Steampunk (Girl Genius includes Paris and Britain, and is primarily set in what is presumably roughly Germany) stories, and some fantasy too though this is a little rarer compared to a "hole in the world" idea where fantasy stuff invades our world or vice versa.
Star Mapping
Star maps are in some ways easier and in others more difficult than a planetary or terrestrial map. The bad news is that it's harder to know where to start; the good news is that it matters very little! All interstellar distances are so large it makes little real difference as far as the world's inhabitants are concerned. Generally the only advice I can give is to not be too regular or too spread out; have clumps (which will probably be the areas where interstellar civilisations can expand) and also gulfs.
With star maps the other thing to consider is size and depth per planet/location. Authors often spend years if not a lifetime mapping the detail of, say, a continent or even a country, let alone a whole planet. If you're taking on the job of literally constructing a whole galaxy, you're going to need to cut corners. Ways to do this; firstly, have very low population densities (this is surprisingly uncommon but I did it with Cepheida). This means that you only need to deal with a small inhabited area on each planet and many planets won't have inhabitants at all. Good for exploration-based ideas, but less good for giant interplanetary war scenarios where billions die each day blah blah etc. The second solution is to assume that a planet is just one biome. I did that with Cepheida as well, but it's also been done in pretty much all the big sci-fis such as Star Wars (Tatooine is a "desert planet", Coruscant a "city planet", Dagobah a "swamp planet", with little indication of variation, unlike on earth which happily has deserts AND swamps AND cities AND icecaps). It works well as long as you don't question it too much, but if you want something believable it may not always be the best plan. Solution three is just to not ask tricksy questions or, depending on the project, to do the "you can make YOUR OWN world, dear reader/player/etc" option.
So there you have it - a range of basic options and ideas for how to lay out your maps. I'm not sure what the next article in this series will be exactly, so do comment if you have preferences - either one on settlement growth and placement, or the importance of rivers and water systems, might be a good next step I think. As ever, I hope you enjoyed this, and do stay tuned for more!
An Unexpected Bestiary: The Second Parchment
March 18, 2018, 05:37:27 PM
An Unexpected Bestiary: The Second Parchment
By Jubal
By Jubal
So, I was hoping to get a few more bonus articles than we're going to end up with today, but hopefully this will be a reasonable offering - moving on from An Unexpected Bestiary, my previous article discussing some interesting and lesser known real creatures and thoughts on how they could inspire creativity in game design, creative writing, and beyond, I can now proudly present The Second Parchment, a continuation of that article with seven more bizarre and wonderful creatures. Some of these you may never have heard of: others you'll be familiar with, but hopefully I can show them to you in a different light. Read on to discover more...
Quolls
The quoll is a marsupial (well, one of six species of marsupial) roughly similar in build and ecological niche to the mustelids of the rest of the world. The name has aboriginal roots – early settler names like "spotted marten" or "marsupial cat" were dropped in favour of the more distinctive word. Solitary hunters and scavengers with a powerful bite, the smaller species eat small mammals and frogs, whereas the larger ones can take on birds and slightly larger mammals like echidnas.
The quoll could have a lot of fictional uses similar to a weasel or stoat – they're a good "exotic mage's familiar" option, and their spotted appearance gives them a very particular and striking look that differentiates them from a marten or polecat. If you're willing to play around with their behaviour, size, or biology, there's a lot more you could do with them – a giant one, or a pack of large ones, could be a pretty interesting threat to a character. Whilst I'm not aware that you can train real quolls very easily, I can imagine they'd also present a fun twist on "sneaky animal sent in with enough smarts to steal keys and pick locks", if you've used monkeys one time too many for that.
Saiga Antelopes
The Saiga is a small, critically endangered species of antelope from the central Asian steppes – only around 50,000 are left after a major population crash in the past few years. They are best known for their bizarrely shaped face, with bloated nostrils that help filter out dust and cool the animals down in the summer months. Males have impressive horns, and the species lives in large, highly mobile herds – their main defence against predators and natural disasters is simply to move on to literal pastures new.
The Saiga have traditionally been hunted – the Chinese population has now been entirely wiped out – both for their meat, and for their horns, which are used in Chinese "traditional medicine" much like rhinoceros horns are and can sell for large sums of money. Steppe antelopes like this are definitely an option for hunted beasts. I think the distinctive look and relatively small size of the Saigas could make them a fun mount for some sort of little folk in a fantasy setting: unlike a lot of antelopes, they look sufficiently different and alien to creatures we know better that it could really mark out riders as otherworldly.
Mata mata
The Mata mata is one of the most bizarre looking vertebrates on the planet. It's a South American freshwater turtle with a huge head triangular and exceptionally long neck, and an extremely knobbly skin. Its feeding method is pretty simple. It sits under the surface of a pool, with its up-pointed nose allowing it to breathe as if through a snorkel; thanks to its less than elegant appearance, it just looks like floating detritus, fooling predator and prey alike. It sits there and waits for a fish to come past – then simply opens its huge mouth and throat and sucks, dragging fish and water alike in and swallowing the lot.
I think the above – and the species' unique appearance – speaks for itself when it comes to using the Mata mata in games or writing. A giant one would make a ready-made "trap-type monster", waiting to just suddenly gulp down an unsuspecting player or even boat, depending on how big you made one. They're also not hard to keep as pets, especially since they don't tend to move around much, so they'd be a good exotic pet for... well, I leave the imagination of the sorts of characters who'd want to keep a Mata mata up to you!
Desman
Desmans are essentially aquatic moles, which is a pretty cool starting point for an animal. There are two species of desman: a southwestern European species found in the Pyrenees and northern Spain, and a Russian species found in the Urals. They have extremely sensitive snouts, and their paws are adapted more for swimming than digging: they rootle around for small creatures on the edge of mountain streams.
The desman has some pretty cool features like echolocation, and has been hunted and trapped for furs in the past, which gives it a baseline of relations with humans. I think there are some other interesting ways one could use them in stories, though: I quite like the idea of desmans as message carriers, perhaps with a little waterproofed bag tied to their leg and trained to slip out through a castle or mill's stream to carry messages to a partner in crime or spy in the enemy camp. They'd also of course make endearing children's characters much as water-voles and other semiaquatic creatures seem to in many actual works of childrens' fiction. A story of how the desman learned to swim could be a nice Just So Stories style idea to work on. In general, I think it's nice to have animals for fiction that are alike enough to a well-known creature for people to relate to, but with a twist to make them sufficiently different to be interesting, and so the desman's position as a water-mole is a nice one to play around with.
Hoopoe
Few birds have so rich a literary and mythic tradition as the hoopoe, yet so little showtime in modern writing. These little birds have extremely distinctive Mohican-style crests, and orange colouration which makes them very noticeable and distinctive. They're found across much of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
From the earliest times, hoopoes have been noticed and. They eat a number of insect species including agricultural pests, which gives them some positive attributes, and in many middle-Eastern and early cultures they had royal connotations. In ancient Egypt the symbol of the hoopoe was related to legitimacy in birth; in Aristophanes, the hoopoe was the king of the birds, and in the medieval Persian Conference of the Birds, the hoopoe becomes the birds' leader as they attempt to find the Simurgh, their king. In Abrahamic and European folklore they have less positive connotations: they are not kosher in Judaism (though this didn't stop them being named the national animal of Israel in 2008), and they have associations with thievery and death across parts of central and northern Europe. In Scandinavia they were once seen as harbingers of war, and in Estonia their song is said to foretell death; meanwhile in medieval ritual magic, they had further death associations, with the sacrifice of a hoopoe called for in magic books to aid in the summoning of demons.
With so many associations, and their extremely striking appearance, it's very surprising to me that we don't see more hoopoes. Whether you're writing a Middle-eastern ruler, a Minoan trying to claim your birthright, a Viking looking for portents of the future, or a medieval German necromancer, give these little guys some thought – they may be more important than you know.
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Sorting Hat Spiders
So, these guys, Eriovixia gryffindori, are mostly being included here for the name, but there's some interesting discussion to be had around that. The sorting hat spider was discovered in 2016 in India, and its distinctively shaped cephalothorax (the back half of the body) is thought to have developed in order to make it easier for the spider to mimic leaf litter and hide from predators. Both the common and Latin names were given based on its similarity to the Sorting Hat in JK Rowling's Harry Potter books – originally owned by Godric Gryffindor.
Invertebrates and other animals, especially ones added anew into an existing language, are often named after existing forms, animals, ideas, or cultural phenomena, and when making up fantasy creatures for your worlds and settings that's something to take into account. The idea of having animals that are seen as reflecting the human world in their shape, style, and form is something that's a pretty interesting one to play around with too – in a fictional setting, there actually could be some sort of symbolism in the creation of such animals, or alternatively one could play around with giving animals very different connotations to the ones our own culture has come up with.
Walrus
The walrus is certainly a well known animal but, I think, one that gets underplayed in fiction. I think a lot of people have the same issue I do with them, which is that I basically think of them as "those seal things with the tusks", and then mentally assume they can't be that much bigger than a regular seal... whereas in fact a pacific bull walrus can weigh in at two thousand kilos, about equivalent in weight to a white rhinoceros and not far off the bulk of an Asian elephant. These things are biiiig. And pretty dangerous as a result, of course – though the amount of blubber and ivory that can be gained by hunting one made it worthwhile for many throughout human history. Walrus ivory has been a particularly major part of creations across the arctic and subarctic world - the Lewis Chessmen are mostly carved from walrus tusks, and they've been an important basic carving medium for cultures across that part of the world.
I'm admittedly not well read in fantasy generally, but I really can't think of many settings that involve a walrus – but as a serious level opponent, they're as dangerous as a bear or shark. Metre long tusks are a formidable threat, to say the least, and they come in literal herds rather than just being solitary. Their semiaquatic nature can make them a potential target/threat on both land and sea, as well, which adds to their potential versatility. In the wild, only orcas and polar bears ever seriously attempt to hunt them, and even then mostly only older or infirm individuals. If you want a really heavy-duty opponent in a snow-bound adventure, think about the walrus – its size and power alone make it a genuinely formidable beast to include in any sort of writing or game design.
And there you have it, seven more unexpected creatures and some thoughts on their potential roles in your creative works! I defintiely have more than enough animals left for a part three, so let me know if you want that to happen sometime - and I hope you found this a good bonus article to have for Exilian's tenth birthday today!
This article is part of a series: you can also read Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and the Pangolin Special.
The Two Cows (Llamas?) Theory: Exilian Edition
March 18, 2018, 05:37:16 PM
The Two Cows Llamas Theory: Exilian Edition
By Jubal
By Jubal
A special 10th anniversary edition of the Two Cows theory! I'm not sure that trying to explain anything about Exilian makes any more sense when done this way, but given none of it made sense to start with... well, why not? As such, I present to you the Two
The Church of Bunneh
You have two llamas. You put them in your signature in an attempt to achieve world domination. The two llamas fall out in a terrifying religious schism.
Cyril & Methodius
You have two llamas. You invent an alphabet perfectly attuned to llama noises and teach them to write.
Exilian Democratic Union
You have two llamas. You attempt to abolish the concept of ownership.
Forums for Internet Freedoms
You have two llamas. You give them the vote.
The House of Generals
You have two cows. They are armed with a disconcerting number of rifles, and at least one thermal pod.
The House of Glaurung
You have two llamas. You sell them and hoard the gold.
The House of the Phoenix
You have two llamas. You're convinced that one of them is a guanaco.
The House of Scholars (Jubal)
You have two llamas. You also have two golden moles, two echidnas, two owlbears, forty-one penguins, and an extremely large number of pangolins. This is as it should be.
Internet Democrats of Exilian
You have two llamas. You pledge to do something different with them in a way that is also exactly the same as all the other systems listed here.
The Krishnabots
You have two llamas. You attempt to preach the word of Krishna to them, and are disappointed when they spit in your face and short out your bot-circuits.
Mixed Mods
You had two llamas, but that was many, many years ago...
The SOTK Clan
You have two llamas and a soup dragon. You clone them. One falls from a high place.
Vance Miller
You have two llamas. You attempt to sell them a badly made second-hand kitchen from China. They are unimpressed.
Wibulnubniblia
You have two llamas. You get them drunk on bootlegged alcohol.
The Beauty of RSS
March 16, 2018, 09:53:25 PM
The Beauty of RSS
By Jubal
By Jubal
The RSS logo - look for this to find feeds!
...or at least, that's how it's marketed. There's a lot of downside to the sort of hyper-targeting that goes on nowadays, especially in that it ultimately means you have. Facebook is the most egregious example of this: which posts appear on your news feed is determined far more by what Facebook thinks is popular than what you think you want to see, making it extremely difficult to get updates from people who Facebook doesn't think you want to see news from. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this latter category is especially populated by smaller content creators, businesses, and hobbyists, who can't afford the increasingly exorbitant sums needed to pay to break through Facebook's content algorithms and build a large audience. Twitter operates a similar model, allowing promoted tweets to stay in view as others shoot down the timeline at a rate of knots. Facebook is, despite some signs that its market share may arguably be dropping, still extremely dominant in how people use the internet, both in how they discover content and how they get updates on it. In other words, if your Facebook page gets a new user, that's not necessarily a promise of future engagement: to access all of the users who've "liked" your page, nowadays, you now often actually need to pay to boost your posts in order to do so.
To put it in starker terms, Facebook is actively using the fact it controls the main platform for content finding and social updates to choke off creators who aren't prepared to pay them. Of course, they're a business, and that's their decision - but if you want smaller creators to survive, or if you just want to make sure you're actually seeing the content you want to see, it's time to start thinking harder about how you get updates.
RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is one possible answer. RSS is, essentially, a way for websites to create easy feeds for content in a format that can then be picked up by aggregators. It's essentially a standard XML sheet format that can be updated by the site, published to a known URL, and then picked up by aggregated "feeders" which can then show people the content and notify them when it's updated Created in the late 1990s, it was a major part of internet ecosystems through the mid-2000s until social media really started taking over people's content feeding habits.
So why go back to it? For one thing - no algorithms. RSS will just list the sites you add to it, and tell you when one of them updates, it's as simple as that. No more rolling a d20 to see if you're one of the lucky 10% who gets told what your favourite comic artist has actually published this week. These days, RSS feeders will sit as a little taskbar icon at the top of your web browser - you can then click on it, scroll down your list of feeds, and see what's new. I guess it's possible this could get difficult if you were trying to syndicate a really large amount of content this way, but I tend to find that I can leave off sites I check super regularly anyway and that even the fairly sizeable amount of content I look at doesn't pose a problem. For content from sites where I really need to get those updates, RSS is especially good: I won't run the risk of missing something like I would with a social media follow. It also ensures I can better support and read stuff from smaller creators, most of whom will have RSS running for their blogs or comics as it's easy to set up the feed. Even better, I don't need to give anyone my email address like for a mail newsletter - I just pick up the RSS newsletter via my reader, without risking it disappearing into the dark abyss of my inbox or cluttering things there up at the wrong time.
I mainly use the Firefox add-on Brief as my main feed reader, and I'd really recommend it. I've also got the free version of Feeder running on my chrome browser, which has a few annoying features telling me to upgrade to the non-free version but is otherwise very good. Other options for different browsers or app systems include Feedly, Panda, and Reeder. It's worth having a hunt around to find what's good for you; another advantage of RSS systems is that there's genuine diversity and choice in what's out there, and the standard XML format is open for all sorts of readers and aggregators to parse it. Once you have a reader, all you need to do is go to the URL of a feed, and your browsers/readers will offer you the option to subscribe to it. That's it!
So there you have it - the beauty of RSS. I don't think it's the only solution or part of building a more open internet, but I think it's a very good first step and I'd really encourage people to use it especially to support smaller content creators. If you liked this article, go get a reader and get finding sites to subscribe to (look for the RSS logo like the one above). And of course, make sure you add the Exilian newsfeed to get more like this in future!
The Bones of Earth 3: Worlds In Space
March 02, 2018, 10:54:20 PM
The Bones of Earth 3: Worlds In Space
By Jubal
By Jubal
So, having done The Bones of Earth 2 on more unusual fantasy world ideas, here are some thoughts on some sci-fi world building – how we can take into account the conditions in which planets form and their physical characteristics emerge, and some hints on how that might translate into world-building and the basis of different settings. One of the major issues with sci-fi is that we frequently have to work on an inter planetary scale, such that it's often hard to do more for planets than "this one's an ice planet" or "this one has trees", whereas of course planets should have a wide variety of different biomes. Whilst the sheer scale makes it hard to envision entire planets, thinking about how they work physically may be a helpful place to start. So without further ado...
Diameter and density
There are two things these affect; firstly, the planet's size, and secondly its surface pressure. Size is fairly self-explanatory – a planet with a larger area has more surface on which to fit continents, etc. Pressure is more complex but worth considering for sci-fi settings in particular: it relates quite heavily to density. If you, for example, had a planet which was the same diameter as earth but more dense, then the surface gravity would be higher. There's also the question of atmospheric density as well; a dense atmosphere will mean more pressure at surface level. This, in turn, affects how evolution might take its course at the planet's surface. A high pressure world will make it harder for plants to grow tall and animals to move, likely leading to stockier and more muscular forms of life, and vice versa. It also affects what sort of structures can be supported – exoskeletons, for example, have something of a size limit on earth, because the weight of the external plates becomes too great above a certain point. In a world with lower gravity, insectoid creatures could be much larger as a result of the lower pressure & gravity.
Volcanicity
Venus is an incredibly volcanic planet; having suffered from a form of runaway global warming as a result aeons ago, it's pretty much a sulphurous, burningly hot hell-hole. Earth, with moderate volcanicity, is considerably more pleasant. Other planets that have no volcanicity at all will often correspondingly have no atmosphere at all, which doesn't tend to bode well for the future of life thereon. In other words, volcanoes and having a hot core to a planet are vitally important to life, but within certain levels. Life evolving on a high-volcanicity planet, or whose planet somehow became more volcanic, might have need to adapt to higher levels of toxic gases and extreme heat. The reverse situation, perhaps more likely, might be if a planet with little life was "dying" as a result of its volcanoes steadily going dormant and insufficient carbon dioxide being pumped out to replace losses. Volcanoes of course also shape the landscape – be that shield volcano mountains, volcanic plains, or simply the fact that volcanic ash is rich in nutrients and tends to lead to areas of very fertile soil in the locality.Orbit
Orbit affects solar radiation levels; too close to a sun and the planet is burnt to a crisp, too far out and it is frozen solid. However, how far out that is depends on the size and heat of the star; it's also not always the case that an inhabited body will primarily orbit a star. Gas giant planets have large moons which could equally be the basis for space colonies if not life itself. Stars need not necessarily be sun-like, either, and systems with two suns certainly exist – though in a system with a much larger or much smaller star, or a binary star system, the whole planetary system could end up rather more volatile; only a third of binary star systems have planets, whereas the majority of sun-like stars have some.
Spin
Warmth and radiation levels are also affected in terms of how different parts of a planet experience them by spin. Spin is integral to planets forming – the disk of particles from which planets form is only thrown out by their star spinning in the first place, and that spin then leads to any eventual planets still having their own spin as well. A planet that spins fast will have shorter days, a planet that spins slower will have longer ones. But that's not all: a planet doesn't actually necessarily spin on exactly the same plane as the one in which it orbits its sun, and the tilt is what causes seasons – the bigger the tilt, the sharper the seasonal effects. One final thing to think about is planets that don't spin, or rather don't appear to – these "tidally locked" bodies often end up with one side constantly facing their star (an effect we can see in our own moon, one side of which is never visible from earth). This could easily lead to extreme differences of climate on a planet, with a thin "habitable" zone at the edges, and an inhospitable a hot face and cold face. Any inhabitants might either need to stay in the habitable zone, or have some pretty serious adaptations to allow them to venture into the extreme regions of their world.And there you have it! I hope this was useful, and helps you build some worlds where your characters, players, or whoever can develop in a more natural-feeling way based on the properties of the little ball of rock they're clinging to as it passes through space. Sometime in the next few weeks I'll hopefully get to finishing The Bones of Earth IV, so stay tuned for that - in the next article in this series, I'll look at different varieties and styles of maps commonly used in SFF fiction and hopefully help you get closer to drawing your own.
An Unexpected Bestiary
February 23, 2018, 11:57:15 PM
An Unexpected Bestiary
By Jubal
By Jubal
Animals, and our relationship with them, are always an intrinsic element of fiction or game design. We do sometimes, however, naturally tend to stick to what we know. In SFF, hippogriffs are probably more common than, say, armadilloes, partly because hippogriffs are really cool but also because we don't have concepts for what other real species are and how to fit them into a creative archetype. I'm going to do a bit of work to rectify that here, with this unexpected bestiary - behold, seven interesting animals and how you might use them in writing and design!
Capybara
Let's talk about capybaras. They're often seen as a bit of a joke animal, if they ever come up in popular culture - they're basically giant guinea-pigs, some people might say, and those people would be more or less right. But it's worth thinking about them beyond that - not least in that they're really pretty sizeable. They're a good four feet long, live in herds, are at home on land or in water, and are pretty hefty - a large, barrel-chested capybara could easily weigh more than a smallish human. To my mind, they represent a whole array of interest in terms of being an alternate large land animal to the usual run of pigs, sheep, horses, etc.
Most of the interesting literary uses for the capybara I think involve swapping them (potentially further up-sized) into roles more commonly done by other creatures in human society. That could simply be as a farmed herd animal, but it could certainly also be as a cart-pulling creature or even a mount. I can somehow see dwarfs riding capybaras - their somewhat stoic outlooks upon life would seem to coincide nicely. I can definitely see the idea of capybaras, which are very heavily built, as working animals though, and they'd definitely present an interesting and clear "we're doing something different here" when it's a bunch of cross-looking giant rodents rather than carthorses lugging the folded-up trebuchet toward the enemy castle.
Emu
Not many species have taken on a modern human army and fairly clearly won. Emus are on that list. Whilst the Emu War has been covered better than I can here, I think emus are really worth looking at and thinking about from a writing perspective. For one thing, they're simply impressive and somewhat dangerous animals - they've got a hell of a kick, with sharp talons, they're fairly intelligent for birds, and can be over 6 feet tall. In a pre-modern society where people were shorter on average, that's a pretty intimidating creature to say the least, especially in large numbers.
Emus, and flightless birds generally, are sometimes re-envisioned as mounts in modern fiction (hence the chocobo), but I think there might be more interesting uses for them that double down on their independence, intelligence and/or dangerous nature. If you're a GM seeking an early-game quest for your adventuring party, trying to nest-hunt from some emus (and given that emus have huge, beautiful green eggs, one can imagine why you would) is the sort of thing that players may find sounds a good deal until they have a flock of birds half a foot taller than they are scratching into their faces. You could even go the whole hog and really make them properly semi-intelligent, perhaps set as guardians of some sort - there's a certain majesty to a bird that size that would allow for some nice intimidation tactics if a line of them suddenly appeared working in obvious formation to ward your characters/players away from an abandoned temple or stone circle or sacred rock or whatever.
Markhor
Markhors are basically what happens when you try to imagine the final Pokemon evolution of a goat. They're the national animal of Pakistan, and are mostly found in mountainous regions of central Asia. They're fairly imaginative in what they consider food - they are goats after all - but tend to graze from trees, bushes or ground-plants in the mountains. In the colonial era they were highly prized as animals to shoot, for obvious reasons considering the resulting trophy (and also thanks to their highly alert nature and mountainous homes, which meant they provided a genuine challenge). The name literally means "snake-eater", perhaps from an apocryphal explanation of how they got their giant curling horns - and yes, this makes them even cooler than they look to start with.
I think there are tons of ways you can and should use the markhor in writing and fantasy settings. They are absolutely freaking majestic, for starters, and as a mount they could work nicely for many character types - the noble wilderness leader riding up on his horse is one thing, but it adds a certain amount of punch to have him riding up on a beast that looks like it was invented for the cover of a metal album. There's a myth that markhor spit is good for treating snakebite, which could also easily be woven into a tale somehow. All in all, they're just an animal that is somehow powerful and evocative simply from its looks, and that shouldn't be passed up so much by writers.
Marbled Polecat
The Marbled Polecat is a small ferret-like creature native to the near east. As you can probably see from the picture, it's extremely distinctive, with a dappled golden back and a clearly defined set of black and white facial markings. They dig burrows and live in semi-arid areas where they eat mice, ground squirrels, and other such small mammals; they're fairly solitary creatures, and are more fierce than their size would necessarily suggest was wise, both to one another and to anything threatening them.
I can discuss this one in writing terms quite easily, since I have written about a marbled polecat! In my case, I created a fictional one as a wizard's familiar in the children's book I'm slowly writing, which I think is an excellent use for them in literary terms. They have a certain amount of interest beyond that of a normal polecat (and polecats are inherently at the interesting end of pets/familiars). Using a marbled polecat in this way does, I think, add a certain spark to a character - in my character's case, he's a fairly genteel sort of magician whose ownership of Fessyah the marbled polecat (or arguably her ownership of him) helps hint that there's a lot more to him than meets the eye. I just think these are such visually charming animals that they're very good for stealing the scene, wherever and whenever they turn up.
Olm
The Olm, or Proteus, is the weirder and less endearing looking cousin of the axolotl. I think that's why I like them so much - they're a classic look at what happens when evolution stays in a cave for far too long, with the lack of eyes, extreme paleness, and so on. Like many cave creatures, they look fundamentally alien to us, with adaptations for a lifestyle and setting that's very different to anything we can usually imagine. The clincher for the Olm, though, is that it has all that whilst actually also being a vertebrate with four legs and so on - many deep cave creatures are fish or invertebrates, and they look odd but they're still definitely fish, etc. For the Olm, it looks close enough to our body plan for us to read it as if anything more alien.
The number of things you could do with these in writing terms is vast. They're an alien species packed up and ready to go, if you wanted to make big sentient ones. Their strange subterranean existence could also make them sought after - they're on the list of things some arse spellbook writer will somehow make you go and swim in a cave trying to find. Fundamentally, though, I think it's how mysterious they seem that really interests me. I definitely like the idea of them being sapient, and having an agenda - not necessarily in simple terms we can understand, maybe, but with a very different outlook on the universe borne of millions of years of deep cave life.
Thor's Hero Shrew
So, I'm mostly including this because it's called THOR'S HERO SHREW, which is one of the most awesome names for a small mammal in existence. Not only that, but it thoroughly deserves it - hero shrews (there's another species, the armoured hero shrew, too) have exceptionally strong bone structures for their size - an adaptation that may be to help them worm their way into gaps in palm trees to search for grubs, but nobody's entirely sure. One of the results of this is that apocryphally at least they're strong enough that a grown man can stand on one and it can walk away unharmed.
Now, in the real world, "Thor's Hero Shrew" is a modern appellation, but I *really* want to read the story of how Thor ended up adopting a tribe of shrews or possibly somehow granting them their super-ribcages as a result of some unforeseen shenanigans. One could also further the connection in other ways, either by giving more of Thor's attributes to the shrews (can they call the thunder?) or possibly linking them to his other followers (a Viking raiding party arrives in Africa in search of Thor's sacred animal, only to find that they're rather elusive and, in fact, shrews.) Outside that, they're a useful twist on the idea of shrews being little, skittish animals - these little fluffles are very tough customers indeed.
Tragopan
Pheasants are boring, and that's a pity, because they shouldn't be. "Oh, they hunted for pheasants" is often not really seen as much of a big deal in literary terms because nowadays pheasants are common across Europe. This wasn't always the case, though: the very name "pheasant" is derived from "the bird of Phasis" - Phasis is now the port of Poti in Georgia, and was where the ancient Greeks imported pheasant meat from in large quantities as a delicacy. In fantasy terms, it's strange how little characters hunt as a pastime, considering the prevalence of hunting throughout history and folklore, and to have them hunting for anything less than a unicorn is seen as underselling things.
But what if there was a way round this, where one could find a bird with many of the same properties as a pheasant, but with brighter colouration and a cool name your readers are less likely to have heard of? Fortunately, the natural world has you covered - meet the tragopans. Mostly found in eastern Asia, the tragopans are close relatives of pheasants with amazing and striking colouration. Many of the species are now endangered, sadly, but the tragopan could certainly be a route to restore gamebirds to a more used place in fantasy writing.
That's all for this article! Let me know if you liked these and found them interesting, and I might manage some more (potentially even better researched) unexpected bestiary articles in future...!
This article is part of a series: you can also read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and the Pangolin Special.
Vampires & Music
February 16, 2018, 11:44:26 PM
Vampires & Music
By Belchion
By Belchion
Vampire the Masquerade is a part of the World of Darkness, a setting for a series of Pen-&-Paper Roleplaying Games published by White Wolf where the player takes on the role of traditional horror monsters like werewolves, changelings or (most prominently) vampires. The setting more or less merged horror stories with esoterics and technophoby, strongly drawing from the cyberpunk asthetics with powerful corporations and dark cities.
In the Pen-&-Paper Roleplaying Game "Vampire: the Masquerade", one takes on the role of vampires. Most vampires belong to highly hierarchical sects called Camarilla and Sabbat. The Camarilla represents an ossifed ruling caste that subsists on favours, backroom deals, and intrigues, whereas the Sabbat represents violent political movements that attempt to overthrow the system and impose their own absolute rule.
Furthermore, all vampires belong to a clan. While players have to agree on a sect the whole group belongs to, members of different clans can and do work together. Those clans are bound by a shared clan curse and clan boon, which creates strong archetypes. By interpreting this archetype one can find ideas how to interpret vampires from this clan.
My friend Teylen recently had the idea to combine vampires and music, showing which songs fit her idea about the Clan Malkavian. I highly recommend checking her ideas, which are completely different from mine.
I decided to follow suit, albeit in a more methodical way as I lack the broad music knowledge that allowed her a more spontaneous approach. First, I defined the archetype Clan Malkav represents in my opinion, and then tried to find songs or music that fitted this theme.
Archetype
First of all, what archetype do the Malkavians represent? They are insane and they are fools, but theirs is the insanity that breaks through illusions and grants new insight. Accordingly, they are also known as seers and soothsayers. Still, they are monsters, and the Joker from Batman is as much a Malkavian as Cassandra of Troy.
The Music
Toccata e Fuga in D minor
The first piece that comes to my mind is always the Toccata e Fuga in D minor from Johann Sebastian Bach. In several beats, it sounds somewhat dissonant, and yet powerful. Furthermore, it was featured prominently in regard to several delusional film villains and, of course, some vampires.
Trout Mask Replica
Second, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. This song is famous among musicians, because the composer was completely uninhibited by any norms and traditions. He combined instruments and song without any regard to each other. And even though the album is also described as the most horrible album ever written, it still inspires musicians to this day and helps them to innovate. Just the same, a Malkavian's erratic behaviour still somehow furthers the plans of the clan as whole.
Jeanny
Falco sings in Jeanny about delusions and the escape into a dream world, from which there is no escape but death. Just like there is no escape from their clan's curse except for true death. The song is ambivalent about who is tortured by whom, just as one cannot be sure who truly controls clan Malkav.
Chain Of Fools
Aretha Franklin sings in Chain Of Fools about being bound to someone who treats her cruelly, just as Malkavians are bound to their insanity and the voices from the Malkavian Madness Network.
Cassandra
As I already mentioned Cassandra as one of the prototypical Malkavians, the song of the same name by Theatre of Tragedy fits well into this theme, given its rather macabre nature and rather depressive, yet energetic tune.
Conclusion
As ephemeral as this article might seem, it still helped me to gain a clearer picture for Clan Malkav and its role in the World of Darkness. And even if it does not have this effect on you, dear reader, I hope it will at least acquaints you with music you would otherwise not have listened to!
Realms of Myth: Somalia
February 09, 2018, 11:40:34 PM
Realms of Myth: Somalia
By Jubal
By Jubal
This is the first of what will hopefully be a number of articles on the folklore of different world regions that I'm thinking of doing. In particular, I'd like to explore bits of folklore that haven't made their mark on the modern fantasy and gaming scenes, and showcase some of the reasons why you might want to read and discover more about them. The worlds we know as "fantasy", which have their roots in a mixture mainly of Northern European, Greco-Roman, and western Christian myths and legends, are just based on a small portion of the world's mythical output, and I hope looking at some more in these articles will help spark off ideas for some readers.
For this article, I'm doing – there's a huge amount more to say about Somali myth than I have time to write here, and I hope I'll manage to come back and write more on it at some future point, but here are some of the themes that for me make the myths of Somalia quite so fascinating:
Folk(lore) on the move
A typical Somali landscape - in places like this, it can pay to stay on the move.
Kinfolk and close kin-groups are also a very large element of Somali myth (and one that finds echoes in some older European myth but is often quite absent from its modern fantasy variants). Part of the corollary of having a society based on small, closely related encampments and clans is that a great deal of narrative tragedy is built up from internal familial jealousies and disagreements. In one myth a character known as the "missing-fingered priest" murders his wife Falaad's brother over jealousy that he is too close to their son, for example; these sorts of close kin-politics issues are the bread and butter of storytelling, and are an intriguing look at story-driving dynamics in these sorts of smaller groupings.
Another thing it's worth thinking about is what different societies value – herds and herd animals are often looked upon in derogatory terms in modern fiction, or are almost completely absent from them – but this idea of the "adventuring" (usually upper and/or urban urban) classes who tend to be the heroes of our modern stories looking down upon the rural world is a very modern creation. Somali myth often takes us into a world where keeping a good herd of camels or other prized animals could be the difference between life and death when times got tough, and where, for exactly this reason, having a really large herd was the sign of real, practical power, writ large in the faces of grumpy livestock. It's an interesting counterpoint to the "jewels and silks" view of power that fantasy worlds often give us.
Female heroes and villains
Whilst male characters often play significant roles in Somali folklore, many of the strongest and most important characters are women, including the two most famous mythical figures in Somalia, Araweelo and Deghdeer.
The most significant central female character is Araweelo, a mythical warrior queen who according to legend created a matriarchal society. In some myths, she castrates all the men of the kingdom in order to try and better control them, a plan that is ultimately flawed when her daughter conceives via an old wise man and raises a son who grows to overthrow her. Whether Araweelo is seen as a mightily strong embodiment of feminine liberty and success or as a corpulent and dictatorial ruler may well vary according to the taste and intentions of a storyteller. Certainly, she is seen as an embodiment of power – a ruler with herds of a thousand camels who could drink as much milk as she ever desired, but whose downfall is in her excessively brutal use of that power, is a compelling centrepiece to a setting in itself.
The monster Deghdeer is another key female antagonist. Mutated into a ghoulish monster by turning to cannibalism and named for one extremely long ear which she uses to listen for her human prey, she is a far more specifically magical and monstrous terror. Like many good folkloric antagonists, she has a variety of specifically numbered, possibly magical, artefacts (a special cooking-pot, for example) that she uses to carry out her evil deeds, and a range of specific strengths and weaknesses. She's extremely strong, for example, and extremely fast, but so heavy she has difficulty turning, such that clever heroes can dodge out of her path. She's also not generally shown as very bright, as in one myth where two children each trick her into thinking they're helping her catch the other and thus escape together – though she's also capable of cunning, often putting up a whole circle of huts wherever she camps so as to make travellers believe there is a village there and tempt them closer.
These powerful female antagonists are treated as the leading characters in their respective cycles of stories (which have many variants – Hanghe for example records a significant number of different possible deaths for Deghedeer). Many of the protagonists are also female, though – one of the Deghedeer variants has a girl called Falaad as a primary character, and another has a group of girls including Deghedeer's own daughters managing to finally kill the beast that she has become.
Giants and beasts
Hyenas - much more than cackling antagonists...
Hyena-folk are another common part of Somali stories. The aggressive, cackling hyenas that a modern audience was probably mainly introduced to via the Lion King are given a great deal more complexity and interest by the Somalis, especially in their part-human variant as "qori-ismaris" – hyena-men (it is unclear whether they are regularly part-and-part or shape-shifters, and probably variable according to narrative usage). Hyena-folk are generally mistrustful of mankind, but can help and otherwise interact with them too. In one case, one grants a traveller a magic staff that gives him the ability to turn into a hyena himself (as long as he tells no humans), in another, causing problems by successfully winning the hand of a human woman, who then eventually rids herself of the unwanted husband by forcing him to abide by human and civilised customs that he cannot stand. This tension between hyenas as magical and wild and humans as settled is an interesting one to read about.
There are a number of other monsters – the monstrous "five-belly" who eats whole herds and flocks of animals, and one of whose victims results in the birth of the tiny trickster "thumb-size" who outwits bandits by simply being smaller and clever than they are, as two examples. Animal tales are also very common, and often include humans and animals (especially lions or snakes, but also smaller creatures) interacting. Certainly it's worth remembering the presence of animal actors in myth: a manticore or a gryphon of course always have a certain mystique to them, but there's a lot of power and interest vested in perceptions of real animals too, and allowing them to voice their perspective and interact with humans opens up a lot of potential stories.
I'm still very much a novice in the world of Somali myth, and I'm sure there's vastly more to discover than I know, but hopefully the above gives you an idea of some of what there is to look at. Ahmed Artan Hanghe's "Folktales from Somalia" is the source of most of the above stories, and I believe there are one or two other English-language books available (which I'm hoping to get my hands on copies of at some point)! I'd also encourage you to look at Exilian's Somali Mythology Project, which I'm hoping to do some more work on in the coming months to turn it into a useable reference guide to at least the basics of the Somali mythological world (and please do let me know if you'd like to help with that!) Mostly, though, I hope you found this interesting, and I hope you stay tuned for future articles covering some of the world's less widely known cultures and myths!
This article is part of a series: you can also read Part Two, on the myths of Asturias.
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