Druids, dryads, and hamadryads

So I wanted to touch on dryads in this post. Two things: the etymological relationship between druids and dryads, and the mythological relationship between dryads and hamadryads.

In the past the word dryad was used to mean druidess, i.e. a female druid. By virtue of the transitive property, one could argue that a druid therefore could be a male wood nymph or nymphus. I've never seen anyone ever do this, but if you want a male dryad that isn't a satyr and care about the inflection of Greco-Latin loanwords then druid might fit the bill.

In Greek myth, a hamadryad is a type of dryad whose life is bound to a specific tree. If the tree dies, then so does the hamadryad. In fantasy tabletop games, this unique of hamadryads has been folded into dryads in general. This results in attempts to integrate hamadryads to rely on distinguishing them from dryads through any number of arbitrary means that have nothing to do with the original myths.

I generally have little interest in any of these modern distinctions, except for one I found in homebrew. One homebrew page I read introduced a fascinating distinction between dryads and hamadryads for gaming that reflects the original myths. Here the hamadryad arose as the personified soul of a tree, as in myth and the dryad of the Monster Manual. Meanwhile, the dryad was the child of a hamadryad and a father of another race such as human, elf, fairy, or satyr. A dryad could choose to live as adventurer like her father's race or could bind to a tree and live identically to a hamadryad in a manner consistent with the MM's dryad. I like this idea and would like to use it in my own worldbuilding sometime.

© 音楽ナスカ

Resource links:

• https://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NymphaiHamadryades.html
• https://www.1d4chan.org/wiki/Hamadryad
• https://www.latin-is-simple.com/en/vocabulary/noun/8773/
• https://www.latin-is-simple.com/en/vocabulary/noun/8774/
• https://web.archive.org/web/20190923154852/http://www.chqhost.com/LairFiles/races/dryad.html
• http://aidanem.com/word-family-tree.html
• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/druid#English
• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dryad#English
• https://www.google.com/books/edition/Druids/9yITDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=dryad+druidess&pg=PT27&printsec=frontcover

Okay, I guess I'll give my opinion on that Extra Credits video

So Extra Credits released a video claiming that "evil races are bad game design" and got massively ratio'd.

There's a lot to unpack about the video because it conflates a lot of things that aren't actually related. So I'm just going to present a massively simplified argument:

Firstly, our elf-games are violent murder simulators that require players to mow down hordes of mooks. The game is designed that way. Most tabletop roleplaying games are designed that way. If you don't like it, then play a game that isn't a violent murder simulator.

Secondly, while you could easily play a game where you go around scalping human bandits... orcs are just cooler. The use of orcs in fantasy has nothing to do with anti-black racism. Using orcs as your mooks of choice doesn't even imply that they're "inherently evil." The "orc baby dilemma" is a really old argument dating back to UseNet.

There's no way for the players to know that there are good orcs unless the GM goes out of the way to tell them. It's extremely inconvenient to stop and tell the players the backstory of Orc Mook #294 when they're just playing for the sake of violence.

Lastly, it's entirely possible that the "pretty" races like humans, dwarves, elves, etc are just racists the whole time. The game books might be giving hugely biased accounts, I don't know?

Congratulations! Your LIZARD evolved into BASILISK!

In previous posts I've talked about "monster evolution," the concept of monsters evolving into other monsters and non-monsters evolving into monsters. This concept has roots in real life myth, particularly qi cultivation by animals in Eastern beliefs (and I'll have a post on that someday). Right now I wanted to apply the idea to the basilisk (and cockatrice, assuming they're not the same).

Traditionally, the basilisk is believed to hatch from a cock egg incubated by a snake or some such. Of course, how often does that actually happen? Are alchemists the only ones responsible for the basilisks running around? Setting aside the messiness of the folklore, one suggestion I saw was that ordinary lizards could become basilisks by growing large enough. This is not unlike stories in East Asia of koi and snakes becoming dragons by achieving sufficient feats (which I discussed in a previous post), and coincidentally by some accounts the basilisk is a dragon itself.

Why do I like this idea? Well, I don't always like the idea of inventing pseudo-naturalistic ecologies for fantasy genre monsters. It always has weird assumptions and cascade effects. What niche does the monster occupy? Is the monster an invasive species or a native species whose demise harms the ecology? How do magical powers interact with natural selection? And so forth. I prefer to sidestep all that.

Have a nice day!

What is ichor?

 In Greek mythology, ichor is the blood of the gods. It is sometimes said to come from the ambrosia and nectar they consume, a feature of several Proto-Indo-European-descended religions, which they must continue to consume or else lose their immortality (or alternately their ability to function). Although in the case of the Greek gods specifically this was less than clear cut.

Ichor has gone on to have additional meanings beyond the Greek origin. In now archaic medical usage it refers to "watery discharge from a wound."

In the video game series Command & Conquer, "ichor" is the Scrin's name for Tiberium. You can probably guess why.

In some urban fantasy fiction, "ichor" is a term for the blood of vampires. This may be seen in Marvel's take on vampires and elsewhere online.

Sometimes authors who don't know any better use it as a synonym for blood, especially the blood of demons and Lovecraftian monsters. Author Ursula K. Le Guin, in her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," calls the term "the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate."

And sometimes ichor is the urine of the gods. I think I'm gonna be sick...

Names for soul jars

I’m currently on a kick where I think of multiple aliases for a concept such as a monster or magic item. In this post, the phylactery of the lich.

The word “phylactery” has several meanings according to wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/phylactery

Here are some other names for the same concept: soul jar (used by tv tropes), horcrux (coined by J.K. Rowling from random syllables, though that hasn’t stopped fans from inventing their own etymology), animarium (coined by myself from Latin anima and -arium), secret heart (used by Palladium), spirit jar, soul gem, etc.

The basic concept of a soul jar is simple: it contains someone’s soul. Why it does is, of course, highly variable. It might be a funerary object as with the mid-Eastern Han Dynasty. It might be a prison. It might be a means of enslaving the soul’s owner as with Afro-Caribbean zombies. It might be a way to cheat death as with Koschei the Deathless, Voldemort, and the D&D lich.

And that’s basically everything I can think of right now. 

Dark elves and racist coding?

(Note: This post was originally composed in August 2019 and was not posted until February 2021. It may come across as "politically correct." The statements I make here do not necessarily reflect my views as of this writing. I decided to leave it unaltered for archival purposes.)

Dark elves are a bit more difficult. D&D in particular depicts its "drow" as literally dark-skinned in contrast to other elves, and has traditionally linked this to their evil nature by writing backstories where they were cursed with black skin for their wickedness. This is disturbing because the same logic was used to justify the historical enslavement of black Africans in the Americas. Pathfinder tries to soften the blow by claiming that drow were mutated by magical radiation when they refused to evacuate during an apocalypse out of pride, but this doesn't actually solve the underlying issue and in this case specifically the drow are still depicted as being metaphorically punished for some perceived sin. Fantasy gaming depicts light-skinned elves as the original or purity, whereas dark-skinned elves are an aberration or corruption.

For example, EverQuest Next depicts dark elves as being even further mutated by dwelling on the setting's equivalent of the shadowfell, developing unusual skin tones, bone growths like horns and spikes, and increased aggression. (Although during development they had various ideas for other skin tones: here, here, and here.)

Many other fantasy works such as The Elder Scrolls, Warhammer Fantasy and WarCraft try to avoid the negative implications by depicting dark elves as dark-skinned and non-evil or as light-skinned and evil. Although non-evil drow exist in obscure D&D lore, the fandom seems quite resistant to addressing the controversial underpinnings of the drow. I can only imagine why.

Still, even settings in which dark elves are distinguished only by darker skin but are otherwise not stigmatized still have racist sounding terminology. Imagine if human cultures were referred to solely by their skin color: white humans, yellow humans, black humans, brown humans, etc. Does that sound like a nice shorthand to label people? Because that is precisely what a lot of video games, novels, and anime/manga are doing with elves.

Given my distaste for the traditional depiction of drow as being cursed or mutated with black skin as punishment for wickedness or pride, I would prefer to adopt Raging Heroes' "burnt elves" backstory wholesale. How exactly does that make my burnt elves different from the standard drow and their disturbing implications? Firstly, these burnt elves are literally charred in body and soul; whereas the elfish skin tones could be anything, so nobody is named by their skin tone. Secondly, this scarring of the soul is the cause of the burnt elves' subsequent behavior (wicked or otherwise) rather than a result; an inverse of the traditional drow being punished with dark skin for their sins. Thirdly, these burnt elves are the descendants of the victims and instigators of the ethnic violence that scarred them in the first place; thus they serve as a metaphor for the cycles of abuse/violence and its harmful effects on society. They have a theme with critical examination, not just thoughtlessly tossing ideas together without considering the context.

My elves are different?

(Note: This post was originally composed in August 2019 and was not posted until February 2021. It may come across as "politically correct." The statements I make here do not necessarily reflect my views as of this writing. I decided to leave it unaltered for archival purposes.)

For the longest time I have struggled with devising a new, creative take on elves. I am bored of lazy Tolkien clones that do not even understand the underpinnings of Tolkien's own creation. Tolkien went to a crazy amount of effort to detail the origins, mythology, culture, psychology and physiology of his elves. Fantasy gaming mindlessly copied surface-level details while ignoring the complicated explanations of why the elves were like that.

Indeed, one of the most important and basic aspects of Tolkien's cosmology that is forgotten in fantasy gaming is the concept of fëa and hröa (soul and body). Tolkien's elves may reincarnate after death, because their souls are bound the world. However, time in Middle Earth operates on the logic of ages, with each successive age being progressively boring and bland. Since the elves are bound to Middle Earth, they are subject to this deterioration as well. The elves grew resentful of their inevitable fate. Sauron played upon this resentment to convince their master smiths to forge the rings of power specifically to arrest this cycle. Obviously, that didn't work and Middle Earth ultimately deteriorated into the horrible modern Earth.

Earlier editions of D&D payed lip service to the concept of different souls by specifically that elves are not subject to raise dead and resurrection spells but must instead be revived through reincarnation spells. This was discarded around third edition in A.D. 2000 and elves became subject to standard revival effects, presumably because it was really inconvenient for players.

Anyway, my efforts seem fruitless since many other authors already devised creative takes on elves over the last several decades since D&D popularized the surface-level Tolkien clones.

• RuneQuest depicts elves as plant people, not unlike some folkloric imaginings of wood nymphs. 
• Warhammer depicts elves as prone to inhumanly excessive emotions. 
• Magic: The Gathering depicts extremely vicious wood elves in its Lorwyn setting, nothing like the popular hippie stereotype. 
• The Dragon Prince depicts elves with horns and ethnic groups based on their elemental magic affinity, such as "moon", "sky" and "stars." (D&D does this too, but here the magic system gives it weight)
• Warcraft depicts various elf ethnic groups created by magical mutations. (These are far more extreme than the largely cosmetic D&D ethnicity.) There are night elves, high elves, blood elves, void elves, fel-corrupted elves, and more.
• The miniatures company Raging Heroes wrote a backstory for elves in which they were depicted as one soul sharing two bodies, one a tree and the other an animal; dark elves were created during a war that burned their groves, leaving their surviving animal halves horribly burned and their souls permanently shredded.

At this point, probably the best I can do is just mix-and-match elements based on the work of other authors. Pick what bits that I like and stick them together, while making sure the result looks holistic and not lazy patchwork.

There are basically only three flavors of elves: high elves, wood elves, and dark elves. Virtually every depiction in the fantasy genre is a variation on one or more of those three. By keeping myself restricted to detailing those three for the most part, I can save myself a lot of work that would otherwise be wasted on convoluted backstories for the bazillion different elfish ethnic groups. Three ethnic groups are much easier to write as distinct than a bazillion.