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More Modern Regions in Faerie?


segerge

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Re-reading "Book of the Empress" recently, I was intrigued by the possibilities opened up by its description of the "Even Wilder West" region - a land originally rooted in the Native American mythos (mythoi?) which has since been corrupted by successive floods of dime-store novels, movies, and radio/TV shows into something close to what most of us grew up watching.

 

Could something similar happen to lands in Faerie originally rooted in European or Oriental cultures concerning World War II? An even weirder World War II, as it were?  An echo of "Golden Age Champions" continually played out for all time in the Land of Legends?

 

Discuss or criticize.

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Hmm... I'm not sure WW II scenarios would really match with Faerie. It's more about the fantastical, the larger-than-life, and war stories have been predominantly historical and realistic. Maybe because so many people have lived them.

 

But there have undoubtedly been evolutions of the Imaginal Realms to match the shifts in popular entertainment-fueled imaginations, especially since they can involve hundreds of millions. I remember discussing here with Dean Shomshak the possibility that the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime has by now become infested with the post-apoc freaks from the Mad Max movie series. Dean suggested calling it "the Way Outback." ;)

 

I would be surprised if now the Japanese kami, oni, tengu, heroic samurai, etc. don't have to sometimes get out of the way of wandering kaiju. Tarzan almost certainly roams West African mythic jungles. Heck, the rain forest of the Mayan region of Faerie might have a Predator stalking it.

 

Elysium, of course, has its "pop culture heavens." Images of famous people from living memory live in Babylon. I'd be willing to bet there's a corner of the Netherworld where not all demons are irredeemably evil, because that notion has become popular in recent decades. That might be where you could hang out with Hellboy, Lucie and Maze, and Crowley. :D

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If you want a "Paper Tokyo" setting, one can only imagine the Aisan section of Faerie being anime/manga/video game based all cranked up to 11. Everyone is a martial artist, or a yokai or youma squeezed into the modern times, or an extremely beautiful girl with an extremely melodramatic life, or an average looking guy surrounded by beautiful girls in a harem anime situation. 

 

And that is not talking about kaiju and mecha.

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One of the more unsorted things about the "Even Wilder West". Stay away from the train tracks. While your likely to find a girl tied to the tracks, most of the time you only find guts and bones and ripped cloth.

 

Unless the train company has a way to wipe away the mess of an occasional nasty mess...

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2 hours ago, steriaca said:

One of the more unsorted things about the "Even Wilder West". Stay away from the train tracks. While your likely to find a girl tied to the tracks, most of the time you only find guts and bones and ripped cloth.

 

Unless the train company has a way to wipe away the mess of an occasional nasty mess...

 

Nope.  As you're traveling along the track, you encounter a woman tied to the tracks.  Another mile or so away is a train coming this way.  You untie the woman and get her off the tracks just in time; the train passes by without harming her.  You continue in the direction from where the train came, and in another mile or so, there's another woman tied to the tracks, and another train coming.  

 

As long as you keep moving with the tracks, this happens.  And if you turn around and go the other way, exactly the same thing happens.  The train is always coming from the direction you're moving toward, and even though you might be passing by a section you've already passed by and rescued a woman from, there's another living woman tied there, with another train coming.  And there's only one track; it's not double-lanes where trains can pass by either direction.  

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4 minutes ago, Chris Goodwin said:

 

Nope.  As you're traveling along the track, you encounter a woman tied to the tracks.  Another mile or so away is a train coming this way.  You untie the woman and get her off the tracks just in time; the train passes by without harming her.  You continue in the direction from where the train came, and in another mile or so, there's another woman tied to the tracks, and another train coming.  

 

As long as you keep moving with the tracks, this happens.  And if you turn around and go the other way, exactly the same thing happens.  The train is always coming from the direction you're moving toward, and even though you might be passing by a section you've already passed by and rescued a woman from, there's another living woman tied there, with another train coming.  And there's only one track; it's not double-lanes where trains can pass by either direction.  

Yep. It's  a thing. It happens all the time there, and it only happens if someone who can help is there.

 

And if your a woman walking next to the train tracks? Probably the same thing which happens when a guy walks along the train tracks. It's not like some mushtash twirling villain just pops out from out of nowhere to grab the lady and tie her to the tracks, right?

 

Seems like nobody gets anywhere walking along the train tracks.

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On 2/18/2021 at 8:55 PM, Lord Liaden said:

I'd be willing to bet there's a corner of the Netherworld where not all demons are irredeemably evil, because that notion has become popular in recent decades.

Like the Shikima Realm in La Blue Girl: p

 

Look, somebody had to allude to that anime influence.

 

But seriously, anime does take a lighter and softer view of demons than D&D Pathfinder does.  No doubt the influence from Buddhism (even if it's still considered a gaijin religion) and the belief in reincarnation.

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On 2/18/2021 at 6:47 PM, segerge said:

Could something similar happen to lands in Faerie originally rooted in European or Oriental cultures concerning World War II? An even weirder World War II, as it were?  An echo of "Golden Age Champions" continually played out for all time in the Land of Legends?

 

Discuss or criticize.

 

WW2 is for sure one of the most mythologized events of recent history, so I think it would have some influence. Though as a period of history, an important aspect is that it very definitely *ended.* So one question is whether one thinks the Land of Legends "replays" famous myths so visitors from Earth can participate -- like, if you visit the subrealm of Mythic Greece, can you participate in the Trojan War? It's not how I imagine Faerie, but I wouldn't argue with anyone who did.

 

But there are other forms of influence. One thought: Were the various pantheons affected, or at least interested in, what their associated mortal cultures were doing? Like, did the Norse-Germaninc, Greco-Roman and Japanese Gods care about the Axis? White Wolf's Scion game (think Percy Jackson for gamers who think they're too grown up for Percy Jackson) included a setup for a World War Two campaign in which the three pantheons backed the Axis for various reasons unrelated to mortal politics, leading to war against other pantheons. (And yes, the "Axis Pantheons" ended up regretting their choice very deeply.)

 

On a much smaller scale, there's that trope of the Japanese soldier who got lost in the jungle and never learned the war was over until decades later. The soldier could perhaps slide through a portal to the Land of Legends as a modern addition to one of the mythic islands of Brendan, Odysseus or Sinbad.

 

Dean Shomshak

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Unrelated, but another modern myth-realm: Little Murderton, the sleepy small town that sees a quite unreasonable number of cunning murders for the local amateur sleuth to solve, a la Miss Marple, Murder She Wrote, or the Father Brown TV series.

 

If the PCs include a detective type, any small community in the Land of Legends can become Little Murderton.

 

Extra fun maybe if it's another trope: the village with a horrible secret, as in Shirley Jackson's "The Festival" or H. P. Lovecraft's Innsmouth or Dunwich. And the murder *isn't* part of the big dark secret, and the locals are as surprised as the PCs to find they've become Little Murderton.

 

Dean Shomshak

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There are two versions of mythical Japan in Faerie. One is called Yamato, which is the legendary Sengoku/Samurai Japan, complete with tengu, oni, ninja, and so on.

 

The other one is called Nippon, a cyberpunk/anime influenced area. You'll easily find everything in Yamato in Nippon, along with mecha, cyborgs, super sentai, little girl assassins, and everything you see in a modern manga.

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I think the broadest guideline for which goes where would be a sort of "urban/rural" divide. While Babylon is explicitly the City of Man, being everything implied by "big city" in every era of history, Faerie is much more a reflection of the natural world. For example, all the precedents for steriaca's description of "Nippon" are very much urban, in environment and culture. OTOH Dean Shomshak's suggestion of "Murderton" is a small, relatively isolated community, such as is normally set amidst large tracts of undeveloped land.

 

"Urban legends" like Bloody Mary and Jack the Ripper are part of Babylon, because that's the environment they arose in. The City of Man has supernatural animals, but they're the kinds found in cities, like talking rats or pigeons, or giant sewer alligators. OTOH habitations in Faerie run more toward isolated cottages, or castles on the grander end of the scale. There are very few large agglomerations of sapient beings, and those dwellings tend to be wondrous and grandiose, like Olympus or Asgard.

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5 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I think the broadest guideline for which goes where would be a sort of "urban/rural" divide. While Babylon is explicitly the City of Man, being everything implied by "big city" in every era of history, Faerie is much more a reflection of the natural world.

 

I had wanted to ask about things like pulp-noir private eyes and Sherlock Holmes in the original post until I realized that both of those examples were much better fits for Babylon rather than Faerie.  For instance, Sam Spade will always be searching a San Francisco-like district of Babylon for the Maltese Falcon, while Holmes will always be solving mysteries in a Londonesque district whose exact time period depends on his Comic Book Fantasy Casting (be it Basil Rathbone, Robert Downey Jr., or Benedict Cumberbatch).

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3 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I think Faerie by this point would hold what I think of as "Inbred Lake," a backwoods region of seemingly abandoned cabins and campgrounds, haunted by near-superhuman masked psychopaths and hillbillies carrying banjos and chainsaws. ;)

To think, before the 1980's, this place was rather small and extremely out of the way. And in pseudo Texes.

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Prehaps the most dangerous place in Faerie is The Atomic Desert. It is a huge desert which is slightly radioactive (exactly how is unknown). Abandoned towns are the only indication that people were here. Go further into the desert, and if your lucky you meet the inbred mutant cannibals who hunt for people foolish enough to come into the desert. Survive the mutants and go even deeper, and you'll bump into giant insects and arachnids of all types. Lord knows what you'll find in the extreme center of the desert (likely a nuclear bomb worshipping mutant cult and their god, an unexploded nuclear bomb of some kind).

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44 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

Off topic, but my Space Opera features an arc of space by the very same name.

 

Again, ofd topic, but it made me happy, so I wanted to share it.  :)

 

I'll be moving along now.....

Oddly there is a Space Battleship by that name  somewhere in media. I forget what they named the anime...

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8 minutes ago, steriaca said:

Oddly there is a Space Battleship by that name  somewhere in media. I forget what they named the anime...

 

In Japan it was Space Battleship Yamato, adapted in English for American television as Star Blazers. "Yamato" was actually the name of a Japanese battleship commissioned during WW II, the biggest battleship ever built, sunk in 1945. In the series the original Yamato was salvaged and upgraded as a space warship.

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