Planar Adventures for Dummies

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

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.

Saturday, August 8, 2020

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.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

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.

Friday, July 17, 2020

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.)