The grootslang is not an elephant/snake hybrid

Addendum 9/3/2021: You can read an academic style write-up about the grootslang at A Book of Creatures.

So I learned of another legendary creature, the grootslang from Dahomey. Its name literally translates to "great snake" and it basically behaves like the traditional treasure hoarding dragon. Some things never change, even across continents. Several explorers claimed sightings of it over the centuries.

Of course, the internet misinformation machine had to screw it up. It's commonly depicted as an elephant/snake hybrid in modern art, even though I couldn't find any primary sources describing it as such. There's also a story circulating about its origins as the ancestor of snakes and elephants, which I could not find in any primary source either; in fact, I suspect this story originates from the Pathfinder RPG directly. Some sources claim the grootslang has a red gem or diamond in its forehead, or even that it has such gems for eyes and/or bewitching powers over onlookers. These are similar to some other stories of dragons, particularly the French vouivre I blogged about before.

There's a bunch of other misinformation floating around too that I can't source either. I suspect the artistic depiction of an elephant/snake hybrid originated as a misunderstanding of it being "elephant-sized." Somewhere along the line an artist or writer misunderstood this as "elephant-shaped" and we got our modern elephant-headed snake. Again, I wonder if Pathfinder originated this too, as I can't find any older art on Deviantart.

Funnily enough, Final Fantasy depicts it as a generic giant snake.

Basically, it's a very typical example of the terrifying treasure-guarding dragons. One detail that is often omitted is that grootslang is the Afrikaans name for the creature and may be more description than actual name. Other accounts call it "Kiman."

Sober accounts tell of a great snake called Kiman cruising the remote canyons between Augrabies and the Richtersveld, preying on stock. The colourful ones claim the snake has a diamond embedded in its forehead, that it entices young girls into the water and knocks men down with its breath. (p258. Dicey, William. Borderline. South Africa, Kwela Books, 2004.)

At Groot Derm I first learnt of the Groot Slang, the Big Snake of the Orange River. The Hottentots believed this snake had a diamond in its head which scintillated in the moonlight, and was brilliantly visible for long distances during the day. (p127. SWA Annual: SWA Jaarboek. SWA Jahrbuch. Namibia, South West Africa Publications, Limited, 1973.)

Enticing girls? Yeah, that's obviously omitted by a lot of the elephant hybrid stories. As you might have noticed by the "colourful" appellation, stories of the great snake are subject to embellishment. Learning more about the actual accounts is very difficult because they're in books that aren't freely available on Google Books. Darn copyright laws.

So Kiman is a very typical dragon all things considered: giant snake, lives in water, hoards treasure, hunts livestock, seduces women, terrifies men, beautiful gem in its forehead, etc.

Minotaurs and minotrices

So I was reading Masters and Minions Horde Book 2: Maze of the Minotaur when I came across the nonce word "minotrices," which the book called female minotaurs. I found this rather interesting, since while it looks like a Latin word it isn't real Latin and doesn't follow the standard rules for inventing Latin words.

The Latin word for Minotaur is Minotaurus. This is a masculine proper noun for which no feminine inflection exists because the name is a compound of Minos (the historical king of Crete, whose name itself became a royal title) and taurus (a bull), thus meaning "the bull of Minos" or "the king's bull" (and which could be further shortened in English to kingsbull, by analogy to kingsman). The Latin word for a cow is vacca and so the feminine counterpart would logically be the Minovacca rather than, say, the Minotaura. (Compare with my prior post on incubus/incuba and succubus/succuba.)

Yet the nonce word "minotrices" doesn't follow this pattern. The suffix -trices is the plural form of the Latin suffix -trix. This suffix is the feminine form of -tor, which indicates an agent noun (e.g. executor, executrix). Even stranger: the book writes the singular form as "minotrice," which is ungrammatical as -trice is in the ablative case and not the nominative.

Apparently the author of the book misinterpreted the English word Minotaur as a Latin agent noun based on superficial phonetic similarity and went from there. While this may seem nonsensical, you may perhaps contrive a functional meaning by delving further into the etymology of Minos. While in Cretan it means "king," it may descent from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning "ascetic" (although such a reading is debated). So as an agent noun (albeit redundant, unless one is aiming for wordplay), it would mean one who lives ascetically e.g. in caves or mazes.

Or you could just call a female minotaur by "minotauress," a neologism dating back as far as at least 1916.

More folklore accurate names for the genie tribes

While reading Legends of the Fire Spirits by Robert Lebling, I learned than Tunisian folklore tells of genies associated with the air, the sea, and the land. (This is also repeated in Between Sand & Sea for Ars Magica, if you want game-ready details for a "medieval authentic" game.) This inspired me to assign new names to some tribes of genies in the OGL rules, as an optional rule for those who prefer folklore authentic jargon rather than the inventions of Gygax and co.

In the OGL rules, the five tribes of genies are Djinn (air), Efreet (fire), Marid (water), Shaitan (earth), and Jann (n/a). Under this option, the Djinn, Marid, and Shaitan would be renamed Leriah (الرياح), Baharia (بحرية), and Siadna (سيادنا), respectively.

Incubae and succubae

I learned something interesting about incubi and succubi recently. The words themselves are derived from Latin. The stem incub- means "lie above," whereas succub- means "lie below." The endings -a and -us are feminine and masculine, respectively.

So that gives us four demons to work with. The incubus is a masculine demon who lies atop his victim, whereas the incuba is his feminine counterpart. The succuba is a feminine demon who lies below her victim, whereas the succubus is her masculine counterpart.

There is so much more to explore, including nightmares, cambions, malcubi, and more. Unfortunately, I'll have to save those musings for later...

Dragon metamorphosis

I enjoy the opportunities opened by the concept of monster evolution, as much or even more than that opened by spontaneous generation. Curiously, there are already number of stories from around the world in which an animal or a person becomes a dragon.

• The dwarf Fafnir became a dragon as a result of the curse on a treasure hoard.
• A Chinese story recounts that a koi fish spent a century trying to jump a waterfall: when it succeeded it ascended into a dragon, and thus the waterfall was named the Dragon's Gate.
• A Korean story recounts that a serpent found a fallen star, which granted his wish to become a dragon.
• Chinese myth says that pearls are tears of the Moon, and some were taken by dragons. One Chinese story tells of a boy who found a magic pearl that could produce endless rice. When he accidentally consumed it, he became a dragon.
• According to Serbian legend, several animals including carp, snake, ram, and rooster could metamorphose into dragons when they reached a certain age.
• In more modern fantasy fiction like Elizabeth A. Lynn's Dragon's Winter or the Dragon's Gate MUD, dragons are born resembling human beings and become recognizable as dragons as they mature.

On a related note, D&D and derivatives often depict dragons as having age categories. The older the dragon, the higher its CR. Dragons that don't have age categories are screwed out of luck. With monster evolution, that limitation is gone. Now the lowly wyvern can evolve into a higher CR dragon, and high CR dragons may be weakened and reverted to lower CR dragons.

I can't wait to do more thinking on this subject!

My pet peeve: alseids, cecaelia, alacorns, *taurs, and other misused and invented monster names

So a common pet peeve of mine is when Pathfinder bestiaries get etymology and mythology wrong, because this tends to bleed over into discussions of actual mythology and result in tons of misinformation being spread.

Here are a few examples:

• In Greek myth, the alseides are the dryads of groves, who liked pranking travelers. They were not deer-centaurs, that's WarCraft's dryads.
• The cecaelia, an octopus-mermaid, is not a mythological creature. 
• The alacorn, a winged unicorn, is not a mythological creature either. However, the "Ethiopian Pegasus" was a breed of winged horned horse recounted in the natural histories of Pliny.
• The centaurs are self-explanatory, though the term itself is used more freely in Greek myth to refer to more than just the horse/men hybrids. Weirdly, the word taur (literally "bull" in Latin) is used to describes centaurs with non-equine lower halves, even though the word centaur already served that role in Greek myth. E.g. horse-centaur, fish-centaur, bull-centaur, etc.

I don't know why, but I really don't like it when people invent nonsense names when they could just use regular words like "deer-centaur," "octopus-mermaid," "winged unicorn," etc.

Sorry for the repetitive and probably pointless posting. I'll try to do better next time.

Demonic ogres and ogre mages

In folklore and anthropology, an ogre is any man-eating giant. They are not a race: any giant who eats men may be labelled an ogre. Folklore and fairy tales have never distinguished them as a distinct race. Based on tales like Puss in Boots, D&D bestiaries introduced the "ogre mage" and later spun it off into an entire family of "oni" very loosely based on Japanese folklore. As would be expected, the writers often misunderstood the original myths.

Dwarfs in Norse myth were dwarfish trolls and dark elves

The modern stereotype of the dwarf was codified by Tolkien. Prior to his legendarium, dwarfs were ill-defined in mythology and folklore. To put it simply: dwarfs were not distinguished from dark elves, gnomes, goblins, kobolds, trolls, et al like they are in Dungeons & Dragons. In myth and folklore these fairies are largely synonymous.

Some unique traits displayed by dwarfs in Norse myth included:

• The dwarfs were considered a type of elf. They were called dark elves, as opposed to the light elves.
• The dwarfs were considered misshapen and ugly, like goblins or trolls. Likewise, trolls were described as dwarfs when they were not giants.
• The dwarfs, trolls, and giants alike all turned to stone under sunlight. The dwarf Alvis said his kind referred to the Sun as "Dvalin's Delight" (presumably ironically).
• The dwarfs forged abstract concepts into magical equipment, which they presented to the gods on multiple occasions. This equipment included Freya's necklace, Thor's hammer, and Fenrir's chain.
• The dwarfs were themselves forged by the gods from the flesh of the first giant Ymir (i.e. the earth itself) and/or the maggots that spontaneously generated from his corpse.

In other folklore they gain a variety of other properties and magical powers. For example, some folklore claims they spend the daylight hours as frogs or that they are members of the Unseelie Court. (See Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology by Theresa Bane for more details.)

Research links

• https://www.dictionary.com/browse/dwarf
• https://www.dictionary.com/browse/troll
• https://pantheon.org/articles/d/dvergar.html
• https://pantheon.org/articles/s/svartalfar.html
• http://piereligion.org/pantheon.html
• https://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta25.htm
• https://abookofcreatures.com/2016/02/15/dwarf/
• http://www.thecompanyofgoblins.com/svartalfar.html
• https://norse-mythology.org/cosmology/the-nine-worlds/svartalfheim/
• http://nordicwiccan.blogspot.com/2013/02/svartalheim.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B3tsognir
• https://www.geek.com/culture/the-origin-of-the-species-dwarfs-1665473/
• https://dwarvenglory.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/maggots-of-the-earth/
• https://ogresvstrolls.wordpress.com/tag/dwarves-gnomes/
• https://www.timelessmyths.com/norse/beings.html#Dwarves
• https://wormstunggod.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/dwarf-dwarf-dwarf/
• https://artipeeps.wordpress.com/tag/dvalins-delight/
• http://www.norse-mythology.cba.pl/page,77,dwarfs.html
• https://www.vikingage.com/HTML/Our%20Friends%20the%20Dwarfs.html
• https://books.google.com/books?id=BYCeXcTjB1MC
• https://books.google.com/books?id=Y5FKDwAAQBAJ
• https://books.google.com/books?q=editions:ISBN0786471115
• https://dotrollsreallyexist.blogspot.com/2013/07/troll-dwarves-of-norse-mythology.html
• https://youtu.be/8VpY_MAT2B8

Nymphae and nymphi

In a previous post I mentioned that in Greek myth the nymphs have numerous male counterparts including centaurs, dactyls, tritons, satyrs, etc. To my knowledge, they have never been collectively referred to by a single name in contrast to nymphs. I suppose there is a first for everything.

The word nymph, which translates to "bride" and refers to myriad minor goddesses in Greek myth. It might interest you to know that nympha and nymphess are valid synonyms, and that the masculine inflection is nymphus, which translates to "bridegroom" and was a rank in the Mithraic mystery cult.

That was my fun fact for the day.

The science of eye-beams and the basilisk's stare

It may come as a surprise that the ancients devised scientific explanations of how seemingly magical creatures operated. Their magical powers had logical basis behind them, rather than being purely inexplicable. For example, the philosophers believed that the eyes saw by sending out beams that touched the environment and relayed its qualities back to the viewer.

This played in the deadly gaze of the basilisk. In medieval bestiaries the basilisk was highly venomous, not necessarily petrifying. The basilisk's stare was harmful because its eye-beams carried its characteristic venom, which would travel through the eyes to the brain and from there be circulated to the heart and the rest of the body. This is why mirrors were effective, as the basilisk would envenom itself when the eye-beams were reflected back at it.

The 3pp Lost Lore: Ecology of the Basilisk posits that the basilisk's eyes release a form of radiation, which is basically the same idea.

Oddly enough, these kinds of eye-beams did exist at one point in the D&D lore. According to the AD&D article "Infravision & Your Fantasy Hero," the 90' and 120' forms of infravision worked by sending out infrared beams.

This concept of eye-beams could be speculated as the basis of gaze attacks, like those of the catoblepas, gorgon, medusa, vampire, etc. Do all creatures have eye-beams of sorts, or only some, or only during certain instances? This seems like a fertile field of study.

Infravision links

• https://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~leirbakk/rpg/adnd/society/adnd_society_infravision.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20161009085709/https://www.frontiernet.net/~jamesstarlight/Infravision.html
• http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/rants/infravision.html

The descending stair

The "descending stair" is a cosmology model proposed in Classic Play: The Book of the Planes. It is based on historical cosmogonies including Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Alchemy, and Plato's Cave.

As the book explains:

"The Descending Stair cosmology traces the descent of energy through the cosmos (Games Masters with a religious bent could do well to research the tree of the Sephiroth). The highest plane is the Firmament, which then descends through the Questing Grounds (an engine for converting the pure energy of the divine into forms compatible with the lower cosmological regions) and the Afterworld. The next plane in the chain is the Vault of Stars, which traces the shapes of the energy’s intentions and destiny. The Astral and Dream planes form a bridge between the wholly immaterial upper planes and the more physical lower planes. The energy explodes into the lower regions in the form of the Positive Energy Plane, which then splits into the four Elemental Planes. These planes provide the raw ingredients to form the Material Plane. The Shadow Plane and evil planes are aborted regions beyond the stair."

The Descending Stair

I mentioned this cosmology years ago during earlier forays into plane building, but I lost focus and forgot about it for a while. I recently regained interest after reading the two-part article "Touched by the Otherworld." To that end, I would like to retread and revise my ideas for this cosmology.

The cosmology may be imagined initially as a series of supra-planes or "worlds", each of which gives rise to the next: Briah, Yetzirah, Assiah, and Gehenna. These worlds aren't just alien locations created by game convention, but energy channels that actively and constantly feed into sustaining their derivatives.

• Briah is the world of creation. It encompasses the upper planes, planes of order, and planes of discord. It is the abode of the aberrations, celestials, and similar. These planes give rise to souls, which descend into the following planes to make life. Sometimes, existing spirits may enter incarnation.
• Yetzirah is the world of formation. It encompasses the elemental and transitive planes. It is the abode of elementals, giants, and similar. This would include the Ethereal Sea from Beyond Countless Doorways by Malhavoc Press. The elemental planes interpenetrate the prime plane, giving rise to the weather and other natural phenomena.
• Assiah is the world of action. It encompasses the material plane and its echoes. It is the abode of beasts, humanoids, fey*, and similar. This would include the preternatural planes from The Faerie Ring books by Zombie Sky Press.
• Gehenna is an aborted world. It encompasses the lower planes. It is the abode of fiends, undead, and similar. These spirits are born from the wills and souls of the preceding planes.

*Fey in particular occupy something of a unique niche, inspired by The Complete Guide to Fey and Exalted: The Fair Folk. I said this before in ancient posts, but fey are reincarnated beings: spirits embodied in physical fleshy forms. Ancient aberrations became trapped in the material plane as it formed, becoming the nature spirits of the prime plane and the alien visitors of fairyland, and this process continues on other spirits including fiends and undead.

One of the reasons I like this model is that it provides a better context for the messy planar cosmology and monster taxonomy of D&D, which otherwise feels pretty arbitrary. I will incorporate it into my Indo-European cosmology as another way of looking at the creation and ordering of the universe.

The diversity of slimes?

I have been playing Slime Rancher recently and it has been a huge blast of fun! It made me think a bit more on how slimes (aka blobs, jellies, oozes, puddings, sludge, etc) have been treated in fantasy gaming. Although they are a hallmark of the genre since its inception, they have received fairly little attention aside from obscure niche products. I wrote a post on blobs a while back, so consider this a second part.

What qualifies as a slime has rarely varied. I have seen some taxonomies list jellyfish, shoggoths, chaos beasts, etc as examples of slimes. The only thing they all have in common is a lack of an internal skeleton and a lack of specifically bilateral symmetry: jellyfish are radially symmetric, whereas shoggoths and chaos beasts lack any symmetry.

Although even that commonality vanishes when you include WarCraft's take on oozes. For some reason they have a tendency to incorporate the bones of prey into themselves to give the illusion of an internal skeleton and bilateral symmetry. They are described an having "elemental heritage" that was "corrupted by the powers of chaos," whatever that means in this context.

Where fantasy gaming has failed in my opinion is that slimes have generally been repetitive to the point of banality. Slime Rancher is like a breath of fresh air because it gives more creative designs and powers to its slimes. Rock slimes roll around in their spiky exteriors, quantum slimes teleport, dervish slimes generate tornadoes, etc. I wish slimes in fantasy gaming were that creative more often.

I forgot to mention it in my last post, but the Monster Encyclopaedia book by Mongoose Publishing included a "primordial ooze" monster. It had a trait similar to the chaos beast in that those struck by its attacks risked degenerating into pools of primordial ooze themselves. A second trait allowed it to sacrifice hit points to spawn an entirely different monster like a beast or a giant, a nod to the origin of its name.

Then we have the intelligent (and sometimes humanoid!) slimes. Jubilex, the lord of slimes and poison is the foremost example. More recently we have been introduced to humanoid-presenting slimes in anime, such as Jellax from Sailor Moon and Rimuru Tempest from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

• Jellax was a simple amorphous slime monster that could reshape itself into various weapons. It apparently proved so popular that somebody wrote a fanfic where it tries to conquer Earth.
• Rimuru was a human reincarnated as a slime with the ability to replicate the properties of substances he consumed, effectively making him a shapeshifter. Instead of going the evil overlord route, he decided to become a benevolent dictator over the monsters of the forest he lived in.
• Jubilex (aka Juiblex, Ghaunadaur) is not a very detailed or important figure in fantasy gaming at large, tho I like to tweak him into the god (not simply a random demon lord) of slimes and poison elementals. (Yes, I treat poison as an element.) I even conflate him with Abhoth from the Cthulhu mythos.

I hope to explore more in the future. That's all for today!

Kishi, the two-faced incubus

In previous posts I discussed myths related to hyenas. Here is another post in that vein:

Fairy tales in cultures around the world share the motifs of the "murderous bridegroom" and "murderous stranger." In Angola, legend tells of a demon named kishi. The kishi pretends to be a handsome man, but conceals the face of a hyena on the back of his head (talk about two-faced!). He uses the human face to charm unsuspecting women, then the hyena face eats them. As with other tales in this vein, the moral of the story is for women to be wary of unfamiliar men.

In modern times, the kishi has appeared as the subject of novels like The Kishi: An Esowon Story. It has appeared as a monster in fantasy gaming, too. Hence this post.

What is an amohaji?

The amohaji is an obscure dragon that appears in Green Ronin’s Monsters of the Mind and Expeditious Retreat Press’ Malevolent and Benign.

MotM describes amohaji as small aquatic dragons, dwelling in sewers and catacombs. They have natural camouflage and a mischievous demeanor. Their powers include breathing fire, telepathic powers, charm and compulsion effects, (un)locking doors remotely, shapeshifting, and magic armor.

 

M&B describes amohaji as small cousins to cloud dragons, masters of illusion and mental manipulation, breathing steam and forgetfulness, and living in migrating cloud lairs. If you kill them, then you can dig a magic pearl out of their skull that lets you cast some of their magic for the next 24 hours until it dissipates.

The two couldn’t be more different. However, the backstory of MotM states the amohaji migrated to the underworld after humans hunted them down ages ago. Perhaps those presented in M&B represent the amohaji before they migrated and adapted to the underworld.