Of ogres and orknies

Ogres and orcs are standard monsters in fantasy gaming, drawing from their depictions in Tolkien's Middle Earth and European fairy tales. The etymology of orc and ogre is a bit more complicated than that, however.

Orcus

The words ogre and orc descend from the word Orcus. Orcus was a Greco-Etruscan god of the underworld, whose name literally translates to "oath." He punished perjurers and accompanied the goddess Dike ("justice"). His appearance changed dramatically over time.

In D&D, the name Orcus is applied to a demon prince of the undead. Not only is he infamous for employing the undead, he is even rumored to have created them in the first place.

Orcs and orknies

The word orc, as used by Tolkien, descends from Old English compounds orcþyrs and orcneas (plural). The  morpheme þyrs means "monster, demon, giant," and the morpheme -neas means "corpse." The morpheme orc has additionally been speculated related to orca, thus meaning "sea monster."

However, nobody is sure of the exact meanings. The orcneas have been various translated as "evil spirits," "demon corpses," "devil corpses," etc. I suppose that, if you were making a pun on the various etymologies, it could be translated as "sea devil" or "sea corpse."

C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe mentions "orknies" (singular is apparently “orkny”) as one of the monstrous races that joins the White Witch's army. This is clearly an Anglicization of orcneas! This should not be surprisingly, as Lewis and Tolkien were friends.

Ogres and orchi

Another descendant of Orcus is the Italian orco (plural orchi), translating to "ogre, orc." The orchi of fairy tales were hairy beasts, quite unlike the ugly human portrayals of ogres. It is here that the two general archetypes of "brute" and "lord" appear. Strange as it may seem, the enchanted prince in Beauty and the Beast is an example of the latter.

©2008 EricCanete

The word ogre has several derivatives created by adding suffixes. An ogress is "a female ogre," an ogret or ogrillon is "a young or small ogre," ogrette is a synonym for ogress or ogret, ogrish or ogry means "resembling or pertaining to an ogre," ogrishly means "like an ogre," and ogrism means "the character or manners of an ogre."

You might notice that D&D used the name ogrillon for a hybrid of orc and ogre. It is actually a loanword from French that refers to the child of an ogre. So I suppose that the D&D monster's context would be true if taken literally.

Comparative mythology

In anthropology and comparative mythology circles, the word "ogre" is used to refer to any man-eating giant in folklore. It includes European ogres, Arabic ghouls, Persian divs, Algonquin baykok and wendigo, Japanese oni, Indian rakshasa, etc. This is completely different from the D&D usage, obviously.

I noticed a few interesting parallels between different ogre myths:

• Orcus is a god of the underworld. The orknies are (potentially) demonic corpses. The Athabaskan wechuge and Japanese oni are demons of the underworld that visit Earth to eat humans. The oni are subjects of Enma, the great king of hell.
• Orcus is a god of oaths who punishes perjurers, yet his namesake refers to cannibal giants. The Algonquin wendigo sometimes arises as a result of someone being cursed for breaking the taboo against cannibalism.

I feel inspired to devise my own mythos that references all of these. Maybe something like Pellatarran orcs? Eh, I can always figure it out later!

Genies of the lamp

In Arabic folklore, genies were incredibly powerful beings. They had incredible riches and magical powers. King Solomon bound a number of them into objects like rings and lamps. If the binding was permanent, then the genie would be forced to serve whoever held the prison. This was typically phrased as granting their master's wishes, i.e. orders.

At some point, popular culture forgot that genies were powerful in their own right and started depicting them as being given arbitrary wish granting by their imprisonment itself. It became a common convention for a master to be limited to three wishes before the genie's lamp magically whisks itself away to find a new master (or, less commonly, releases the genie). In many cases the genies were no longer depicted as a race but as human beings who were magically imprisoned and empowered.

Even D&D fell prey to this, as it employs a bizarre compromise between these two diametric opposed approaches. D&D genies are powerful magical beings in their own right, but they also have the limited ability to cast the wish spell on behalf of mortals. The part about being imprisoned in lamps, rings or other small objects is completely ignored for whatever reason, because D&D always warps its inspirations like that. Tradition!

This is ultimately a re-skinning of the Grimms' fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife." In that tale, a prince was inexplicably cursed into the form of a talking fish with the ability to arbitrarily grant wishes. People bound into lamps and thereby granted arbitrary wish granting are the same formula. So many stories have put their own variations on this formula so I can't make too many generalizations. The "wish granted by demon in exchange for your soul" is a common variation, for example.

While the tropes of "powerful being forced into servitude" and "arbitrary wish granting" are sufficient on their own, I feel that combining them waters down the whole concept. It raises the question of why these powerful D&D genies can arbitrarily grant wishes in the first place and why they don't seem to exploit that for their own benefit. Arbitrary wish granting only makes sense if you want a monster to be much weaker than it would be if it could arbitrarily warp reality, or if the source of the wish isn't important to the story. If the monster is already a high level monster and some kind of absurdly rich sovereign, like the noble class genies who grant wishes in the rules, then the wish granting becomes a bit superfluous.

Anyhow, I'm surprised that the "human cursed into wish-granting genie trapped in lamp" trope doesn't seem to show up in fantasy gaming. It sounds like a really good plot hook. What about having both in the same story? On one hand you have powerful genies who are imprisoned and forced to serve whoever holds their prison. On the other you have wish-granting lamps that enslave some hapless mortal as a glorified user interface. How do you suppose they would feel about one another?

Demons of the katardi family

So I had an idea for a monster. The premise of this idea is that the "wendigo" mentioned in Stephen King's Pet Sematary (the novel and both movies) was not a wendigo. Instead, I posit that this cemetery demon was the same sort of demon as seen in the Evil Dead movies.

Jud is the one to imply the the soured ground is haunted by a wendigo. Given that he is not Mi'kmaq and probably heard distorted versions of the folklore, he could have easily been wrong about the nature of the demon. Just like Blackwood and King themselves!

The cemetery demon displays none of the characteristics of a wendigo as it appears in Algonquin stories. It is not limited to acting during the winter, but acts year round. It is not motivated by greed or gluttony, but by more generic malevolence. It does not go around killing and eating people, nor possessing victims to do the same. Instead, it torments its victims with misfortunes, psychological manipulation and (as of the 2019 movie adaption of Pet Sematary) vivid hallucinations a la The Shining or Poltergeist. It possesses and reanimates the dead, using them to terrify and torment the living a la The Evil Dead or The Exorcist.

Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon featured a "god of the lost" who fans conflate with the cemetery demon from Pet Sematary, but there is no evidence of this in the story itself. Both demons appear and behave completely different. In the novel, the god of the lost appears as a wasp-faced demon that torments lost travelers with paranormal SFX until they die of exposure. Perhaps more importantly, the supernatural events of the novel are ambiguous and could have been entirely imagined by the protagonist. Only the 2019 movie adaption of Pet Sematary suggests any similarity when it adds hallucinations to the demon's repertoire. Addendum 10/4/2019: The "god of the lost" is similar to "Oz the Gweat and Tewwible," an imaginary demon that Rachel conceived to represent the influence of evil, the specter of death, and the bad luck inflicted upon the family by the presence haunting the cemetery.

In the Evil Dead movies, the "kandarian demon" possesses both the living, the dead, inanimate objects and trees as "deadites" in order to torment and kill people. Much like the cemetery demon needs victims to bury bodies on its burial ground before it can reanimate, the kandarian demon needs to be invoked by spells from the Sumerian Book of the Dead before it can possess victims.

There is a funny coincidence that I have to share! In the script for Within the Woods, a short film intended to pitch The Evil Dead to studios, the kandarian demon was called "Tinga." It was described as an spirit that protected the Native American burial ground (as if we did not see that trope a bazillion times). When the protagonists violated the grave of a medicine man, it killed and possessed victims as deadites.

Sound familiar?

Thus, I was inspired to make a connection between the cemetery demon and the kandarian demon. The reanimated dead in Pet Sematary are not wendigo zombies, but deadites!

Which brings me to another idea...

In an early draft of the script for The Evil Dead, the demons are described as members of the katardi family. The katardi inhabit forests and, while dangerous and omnipresent, cannot possess victims unless invoked or resurrected by reciting spells from a six-volume book of the dead. Only the high priests of the Ca'n Dar tribe were allowed to have these books, because they alone could control the demons.

Forest demons named katardi, huh? The common thread between the cemetery demon, the god of the lost, and the kandarian demons is that they inhabit forests, display crazy SFX, and have arbitrary prohibitions. In Minnesota, tales told to tourists describe the "wendigo" as a protector of forests. Is that a solid basis for imagining a new family of demons? Seems good enough to me!

Addendum 11/6/2019: YSDC CthulhuWiki has a page on deadites. It made the same connections.

The sa'ir, a forgotten monster

The sa'ir is a weird monster that appeared only briefly in 2e as part of the lamia’s ridiculously convoluted ecology (ridiculously convoluted ecologies were extremely common in the days of AD&D). It is a lion with a goat's hooves and horns. It was never referenced again, and 3e seemingly introduced male lamia which rendered its existence superfluous. That has not stopped conversions to 5e, however.

The name immediately stood out to me because I recognized it as probably derived from the biblical sa`iyr (also sâʻîyr, sâʻir). As an adjective the word means "shaggy," as a noun "he-goat." By analogy, the word is translated as "faun" or "satyr."

In Isaiah 34:14, the sa'ir ("wild goat") is mentioned alongside the lilith ("screech owl") as one of the many beasts inhabiting the desert and night. As Lilith is the name of a night-haunting demon in Mesopotamian myths that fulfills the same archetype as the lamia of Greek myth, I suspect this is where the game's writer got the idea to introduce the sa'ir as a monster related to the lamia/lilith.

Otherwise, the sa'ir appears to be an invention of the game's writer, derived from the biblical verse plus the lamia as described by Topsell and depicted in Tudor heraldry. However, there are a couple of heraldic and artistic monsters that loosely resemble it and might have influenced its design:

• The chatloup (French for "cat-wolf") is a fantastic beast with the face of a cat, the body of a wolf, and the horns of an antelope. 
• The theow (also thoye, thos) is a fantastic beast with the body of a mastiff or wolf, cloven hooves and a bovine muzzle and tail. Dragonlore #71 speculates that it was the result of careless copying transforming depictions of normal wolves into bovine beasts.
• The homeric Chimera was described as having the body of a goat, the head of a lion, and the tail of a dragon/snake. Further variations on this design might add horns to the lion's head.

I do not really see a reason to revive it as a relative of the lamia. At least in my campaign setting, the lamia are the transformed souls of scorned lovers in loose accordance with their mythological origins and not a self-reproducing race that arbitrarily serves a demon lord. Even in the biblical verse, it was only intended as one of the creatures inhabiting the same environment as the she-demons, not a relative.

I can imagine reviving it in other capacities, however. Maybe it is a mad wizard's experiment, as lazy game's writers are wont to resort to for explanation? Maybe it is a variant of the aberrant beasts spawned by the chimera? Maybe it is the male counterpart to the female chimera? Maybe it is a liocorno related to the bicorn and unicorn? Maybe it is related to the chatloup and theow, just another fantastic beast that is natural to fantasyland? Maybe, as its name suggests, it is a relative of the satyrs?

There are any number of possibilities.

Black spirit, basket ogress, and wechuge

During my research I came across bestiary entries for an ogre named Black Tamanous ("black spirit"), sometimes shortened to simply Tamanous ("spirit"). The name refers also to a supposed cannibal cult patronized by that ogre and to an annual winter ceremony or potlach held by them.

According to Encyclopedia of Giants and Humanoids in Myth, Legend and Folklore by Theresa Bane:

Black Tamanous (tah-mah-no-us)
Variations: Dzunkwa, Tsonokwa, Tsonoqoa
A cannibalistic monster from the mythology of the the Pacific Northwest Indians of North America, the terrifying Black Tamanous ("black spirit") would hunt for humans in the wilderness. When the Great Transformer cleansed the earth of all the evil GIANTS he somehow managed to miss Black Tamanous, leaving him to continue to plague the people.
Source: Rose, Giants, Monsters, and Dragons, 51; Underhill, Indians of the Pacific Northwest, 189

According to The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures by John and Caitlin Matthews:

Among the peoples of the North Pacific coast of America, Black Tamanous was the cannibal spirit who was overlooked when the Great Transformer rid the Earth of all the gigantic primordial beings which were responsible for bringing evil. Black Tamanous continued to stalk the Earth, bringing terror as it sought to gobble up people. He was the leader of the Cannibal Society among the Kwakiutl tribe. They met every year during the winter season to observe the ceremonial eating of human flesh.

This story seems simple enough, but further research revealed that it was far more complicated than it seemed. I could find few sources and none that I can confirm are firsthand accounts, so the information I have is sparse and suspect at best. The black spirit appears indelibly marked with a terrible history of racism, colonialism, appropriation, and blood libel.

The "cannibal society" was named Black Tamanous or Hamatsa (sometimes translated as "dog eaters" and "cannibal dancers") and the sources I consulted claimed that these were real, at least during the late 19th century and early 20th century. It was a secret society or fraternity among some Pacific Northwest tribes (the Black Tamanous being Klallam and the Hamatsa being Kwakiutl). It required high dues and feasts, so it was only joined by rich men’s sons. They were reputed to hold black masses where they blackened their faces and ate dogs alive in an orgy of cannibalism. Supposedly they performed such rites in order to influence demons against their foes. (Compare the hellfire clubs seen in Victorian England.) Given the tribes' unwillingness to discuss this issue with outsiders, and the history of colonial governments banning them from practicing their own religions, the veracity of these statements is questionable and it sounds like a case of blood libel. (Compare the "wendigo psychosis" historically used to oppress Algonquin tribes.)

Other more recent sources explain that the Kwakiutl Hamatsa or “cannibal dance” was far more benign in nature. Meat is Murder! by Mikita Brottman explains that the cannibal dance was intended to sublimate such harmful urges, not release them! The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians, by Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, explains that the cannibal dances were purely symbolic. The masked dancers would play-act the ogre Baxbakwalanuxsiae (“man eater at the mouth of the River”, often shortened to Man Eater), a monster comprised of gnawing mouths, and its raptor-masked companions as they decapitated victim roles and consumed carved heads and trophy skulls. This is comparable to, for example, the masked morality plays of the Korè cult of the Bambara people in Mali that were intended to scare viewers into good behavior by displaying the reviled habits of hyenas.

Some tabletop role-playing games took the cannibal cult idea seriously and ran with it. Shadowrun depicts the Tamanous as a human trafficking organization run by supernatural cannibals like ghouls. Chill depicts both the black spirit and the cult it patronizes, and invents additional details not found in the original myth: the black spirit may assume human form, leaves black tarry footprints, and specifically eats cannibals. Given the paucity of information on the myths, online gaming sites have produced increasingly distorted depictions while mistakenly assuming this is true to the original myths.

Possible descent?

The word tamanous (or cognates thereof) apparently appears in the languages of several Pacific Northwest tribes, including the Chinook, Klallam, and Kwakiutl. When transliterated into the Latin alphabet, spelling variations (or possibly conjugations) include tamahnous, taman’awas, tamanamus, tamánawas, and tamanoüs. It is typically translated as "spirit," but its exact meaning is broader due to the various contexts in which it appears. It is used as a noun for spiritual beings (including totems, guardian angels, and demons) and spiritual workings (spiritual power, divine medicine, healing acts), an adjective for objects that house spirits and medicine men who deal with spirits, and a verb for the act of influencing spirits. It may refer to various religious practices such as sacred rites, hobbies, dances, potlatch, and winter ceremonials. The most disturbing context in which I found the word was in accounts of the Pacific Northwest tribes being banned from practicing their own religions, although I suppose I should not be surprised.

Basket ogress

The names Dzunkwa Tsonokwa, and Tsonoqoa seem to be a conflation with another Pacific Northwest monster, the basket ogress. She is an ogress who carries a basket in which she places children she captures, and serves a similar role to the fairy tale hags in European stories. Such stories of cannibal women are found among many tribes along the Northwest Coast. (Cannibal hags appear to be a really old trope, like 30,000 years old!)

The sources I consulted did not explain if this reference was a mistake made by anthropologists or if the basket ogress and the black spirit are indeed the same. I personally suspect that "black tamanous" refers to any evil spirit and anthropologists simply confused this usage.

Compare Wechuge

The sparse origin of the black spirit as a survivor of the transition from primordial to historical times is similar to that of the wechuge found in Athabaskan stories. According to Dunne-za legend, in ancient times the world was the domain of giant animals that preyed upon humans. A hero arose and, with the help of watchful gods, he drove the monsters away into the underworld. However, he proved negligent and some of the monsters managed to escape the purge. They survived in a greatly reduced form, but no less evil and hungry for human flesh. They hide in the underworld just next to humanity, awaiting any opportunity to wreak havoc.

If I did not know any better, I would think these were different accounts of the same story. Given that both tales of the black spirit and the wechuge originate from the Pacific Northwest, I cannot help but wonder if the two tales share some common inspiration. If "black spirit" was simply a generic term as I suspect it is, then it makes sense that the wechuge would be referred to one. Given the lack of firsthand accounts, I strongly suspect that the sources I consulted conflated stories from different tribes that were not related.

(On another note, this backstory loosely resembles that of the Great Old Ones in the Lovecraft mythos. This backstory loosely resembles the beast giants of Norse myth too, which inspired Tolkien's Shadowfax and ultimately Moorcock's beast lords. I just thought that was interesting trivia to note.)

The Athabaskan peoples live in the Pacific Northwest and perhaps had contact with the Algonquin peoples in proximity, so wechuge may be a cognate of wendigo. Because of course it would be! Why would I expect otherwise? When discussing depictions of First Nations culture in Euro-American popular culture, you cannot walk two feet without hitting the wendigo.

Contrast Wendigo

Obviously, the cannibalism aspect has invited comparison to the wendigo of Algonquin belief. The two stories come from different tribes and are not related. The First Nations people were not a homogeneous monolith, so depicting cannibal demons from different tribes (or invented wholesale) together and as enemies risks promoting false stereotypes about real living cultures. In my opinion, if you are going to take a monster from another culture and mutilate it until it is no longer recognizable, then you should change the name to something else and not pretend it is related to the culture that inspired you. Especially not if the original story is blood libel, as it is with the black tamanous and wendigo psychosis.

Did we learn nothing from Stephanie Meyer and J.K. Rowling? (Please do not cheat by keeping the name but sanitizing all connection to the original culture, such as by setting the story in a D&D campaign setting unrelated to Earth. Looking at you, Paizo.)

Conclusion

While my research leaves much to be desired, I think I was able to get the gist of things. The black spirit and its cult appears to be an amalgamation of stories from different tribes, blood libel against tribal practices, and the inventions of game writers. While I do not see myself reproducing these details in full, the idea of a satanic cult that worships an ancient cannibal monster and is opposed by a troupe of exorcists does have its appeal. Even before I heard of the black spirits, I was familiar with the idea from watching Butcher's Block and Mordeo.

On a related note, the mythic Pacific Northwest does sound like a nice setting for a game campaign. There are many different ways you can play around with devouring spirits without needlessly mutilating the original stories or conflating tribes as a monolith.

Mephits

Mephits are elemental imps, serving the same simple role of messengers and spies. They are one of those throwaway monsters that shows up in most monster manuals but nobody pays attention to and whose backstory is constantly changed by the writers.

In AD&D the mephits were imps summoned from the lower planes to animate elemental forms. Later they were tweaked so that they were created on the lower planes, and typically had a low life expectancy since they were often used to send insults.

Starting with 3e, mephits were no longer tied to the lower planes. This change did nothing to make anybody care about them more. Curiously, Necromancers of the Northwest gave them a detailed ecology as a web enhancement for The Traveler's Guide to the Elemental Plane of Fire. In this ecology, mephits may arise spontaneously on the ethereal plane, born to two mephit parents, or created by magic as servants. Mephits that are born or generated lack an elemental affinity, though they might be able to gain one later.

Derek Holland suggested a few new varieties of mephit, such as gilded mephits, number mephits, and shadow mephits. He further suggested a new disturbing origin for mephits: children cursed by magic and enslaved by villains. This creates a moral dilemma for our heroes.

Relevant links

• http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/mephit.html
• https://d-infinity.net/blog/derek-holland/new-mephits
• https://d-infinity.net/blog/derek-holland/new-use-mephits
• http://www.necromancers-online.com/articles/ExoticEncounters/2016/20161205.html
• http://www.necromancers-online.com/articles/BestinClass/2016/20161206.html
• http://www.necromancers-online.com/articles/BestinClass/2017/20171219.html
• http://5e.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/mephit.htm
• http://themonstersknow.com/mephit-tactics/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/3vblot/mephits/
• https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Mephit
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephit

Puppeteer parasites

Puppeteers are a monster based on the common scifi trope of the puppeteer parasite. Puppeteers were initially a blatant rip-off of the aliens from The Puppet Masters. When they first appeared in the 3.0 Psionics Handbook, they were depicted as ray-like creatures capable of gliding short distances like the aliens in the story. In the d20 Modern rules, they were depicted as louse-like and fed on the blood of their hosts. In the 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook, they lost their gliding ability and were depicted as slug-like instead. A variant known as the "flesh harrower" was introduced, which is a blatant rip-off of the aliens from Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.

Puppeteers were originally created by the mind flayers, but since the latter aren't OGL they were replaced with the phrenic scourges when Dreamscarred Press (the same authors who wrote the 3.5 psionics revision) wrote their own adventures and adapted psionics to Pathfinder. Dreamscarred Press provided further details on the puppeteers, such as the "hive brain" variant in the adventure Uncertain Futures.

Here are some in-character factoids about puppeteers to inspire your imagination:

• Puppeteers were created by the phrenic scourges for the purposes of infiltration and subversion. They are not particularly intelligent and require the occasional oversight from their masters.
• The species is divided into several specialized castes. The most common are puppeteer, flesh harrower and hive brain.
• The hive brain is responsible for reproduction and communication. 
• The puppeteer comes in at least three body types for better camouflage: slug, louse and manta ray. The manta ray form is capable of gliding short distances.
• Puppeteers subsist by siphoning harmless amounts of blood from their host. If multiple puppeteers attach to the same host, the blood loss will become harmful.
• Some puppeteers act as brood mothers who asexually spawn immature larvae, provided they have a source of biomass on which to feed.
• Some puppeteers may produce spores which grow into a red fungus known as byrum. If the byrum is consumed by a potential host, it will germinate within the digestive tract and fatally emerge as a flesh harrower. This has earned the moniker "shit weasel".
• The most intelligent and psychically formidable puppeteers are the "mind maggots". Unlike their kin, mind maggots act on their own initiative and require no orders. Indeed, some have rebelled against the scourges in favor of working as arcane familiars. Their fatal flaw is arrogance: even as a familiar they will still nudge their host in the direction they believe is correct. (see statistics in Monster Encyclopaedia II)