Hmmm… I may have bit off more than I can chew. I therefore am revising my rules of engagement for this project and am just going to try and use one or two articles per issue rather than *all* the articles in an issue.
Happily that means that my first step is done, yay!
The pile of skulls pic from 1/76 is the level of detail I want to delve into, so I am satisfied.
Next up: July 1990
I’m still working on the Jan 1976 edition, moving on to “The Chambered Nautilus”.
This one didn’t seem too difficult, just a tad dull. Then, I noticed in the text that fossilized nautilus have been found that had up to a nine-foot shell. That sounds much more interesting than statting up an 8-inch squid.
In the Smoking Sea (an ocean with a very large number of active volcanoes beneath it) a newer undersea mount has erupted recently, spewing mana laden energies into the water directly from a pocket of Enegalan proto-matter. The energies of unchecked creation have polluted the gene pool of the swarms of normal 1-2 ft nautiluses causing them to grow much larger than normal and aggressive enough to try and pluck sailors off of passing ships.To combat this new menace, the Klombasi (a maritime race that were given the secret of using a sextant by their deity) have brokered a deal with the local tribes of K’t’so (one of six sub-species making up the race, all are toothed whales, in this case similar to Yangtze River Dolphins) to locate the source of this corruption and attempt to magically close it off somehow.
The first issue I’m going to try this with is from January 1976 (I picked it randomly from a pile of Geo’s awaiting a place to put them permanently).
The articles (paraphrased from the cover) are:
In the Steps of Moses
The Chambered Nautilus
Stockholm
Haiti
Owens Valley CA
Life or Death for the Harp Seal (a plump example of which graces this issue’s cover).
In the Steps of Moses
This article is mostly looking for historic locations in Egypt and the Sinai that correspond to places mentioned in the Old Testament. But there is a photo that got me thinking about the equivalent of ancestor worship amongst the various clergy on Domibia.
Many of the cultures on Domibia practice ancestor veneration as it is an demonstrable fact that there is a spirit that lives on after death. After several generations the spirit will move on to the correct afterlife (assuming the proper rituals were performed over the remains). But until that time the spirit can be contacted, either by family or members of the clergy, and can give advise or even magical assistance.
This photo made me think about there being some back room in most temples where the remains of the previous generations of clerics are deposited after death. The more powerful (or important/popular) are kept on shelves or alcoves for easy access and the remainder simply placed on the pile on the floor. Until such a time as the spirit dissipated from lack of attention, it would be available to members of the clergy to offer advise, or in times of trouble,help protect the temple and the clergy and congregation. In case of attack, the clerics could call forth the spirits that occupy the skull room to assist in defending things.
The spirits would probably be more useful as information sources as Domibian clerics don’t use magic in the form of spells. Religious magic actually takes the form of temporary advantages that the god grants their follower. Even with this limitation, many spirits could probably be helpful in a battle.
There is one race/culture (the Lonari-Yatah) that are monotheistic, believing that the other gods are in fact spiritual slavers and that the true afterlife should be beyond this plane of existence residing with the true god, K’huda. What would their clergy do with the mortal remains of the departed? It seems that they would want to destroy any sort of fetter that would anchor the spirit on this plane and so would probably burn the body and try to destroy the bones. A major function of their clergy would be to act as psychopomps, escorting the dead to the proper path to reach K’huda.
This whole idea would also make proper burial an important act in almost any culture, as you would not want a loved one or friend to be a lonely spirit, left to dwindle away to nothing and possibly lacking a path to the correct afterlife.
Edit
I realized after posting this that I left off one of the goals, which was to apply the article to a specific Domibian location, person, creature. With that in mind, I think that this particular room is located in the back of the Grand Assembly building in Ascension City on the island continent of South Crestford. The Grand Assembly in Ascension City is one of the largest Inkanian temples in Domibia and the large number of skulls on the shelves are the highest ranking clergy of the past several hundred years. The pile on the floor is made up of the lower echelons.
I had an idea today. I have always decreed that Nat’l Geo magazines were too “useful” to throw away as I do with most magazines after they have been collecting dust for a few years. Today I decided to put my belief to the test. I’m going to go through all my NG’s and try and use at least one thing from each article that I can use in my fictional world of Domibia, and record the results here. That way I can feel free to brainstorm and then distill any useful results into a finalized version.
My ground rules are fairly simple: use each article for at least one of the following; a cultural note, a bestiary write-up, a geographic location, or at the very least, an NPC write-up. The bestiary notes and NPC write-ups will be either in a sort of non-game specific format, or I may try giving actual game stats if I feel adventurous. My game of choice is a heavily house-ruled version of 4th edition GURPS (skills, advantages and disadvantages as well as basic mechanics are mostly unchanged from GURPS, but in my system (SAFUG: Some All F’d Up Game) there are 15 attributes which are used to obtain the 11 skill bases).
The world, Domibia, is a roughly earth-like planet with three moons in a solar system similar to ours. There are 54 sapient races that inhabit the planet, most of which are primarily human, with a couple of dozen semi-human or totally non-human races. The overall tone is low fantasy with some elements of high fantasy thrown into the mix.
All but two of the races are new, having been created by their gods 1000 years ago (at the time of my starting campaign). Each of the 52 “new” races have their own individual deity that formed them, each of these 52 gods is a shard (for lack of a better term) of the original creator (named Araj). After 10,000 years of having a single race to worship him, Araj decided to create a new race. Not realizing how much weaker he was after all these centuries, the process got out of hand, and Araj was splintered into 52 separate entities, each of which created a race in their own image. The Arajay, a race of anthropomorphic elephants who had ruled the planet for 10,000 years were now suddenly without a god and at odds with thousands of new races that appeared literally overnight. The Arajay withdrew in despair (not having the heart to destroy what they deduced was the final act of their god). There is one other “race” which are called Enegalans after their warped creator, Enegal. Enegal was the first attempt at creation that Araj tried. He was powerful enough that he was able to make creatures of his own, but Araj was offended by this and tried to destroy Enegal, hurling fragments of a fourth moon at the surface of the planet to smite him. Enegal fled into the planet itself, hiding since then in the deep underground, seeking worshipers on the surface and sending forth its deformed and horrific offspring to cause havoc.
Anyways, that is the setting I’ll be working with on my project.