For those of you paying attention, we skipped an essay last week. That was intentional, as I needed a week off and wanted to take some time to address a few things (about this very game blog) that could be used to help the players in my current game. This week, I'm back, and it's time to talk about building things. Specifically: enormous monuments, strange stone circles, and that sort of thing.
So let's say that you're an aspiring (or well-seasoned) GM, and you've come to a point in your game where it's time for the players to encounter a long-dead (or heck, thriving and alive, just unusual and unknown) culture through those most lasting of endeavors: the enormous stone edifice. Whether it's a Henge, an Obelisk, a vast and forgotten temple complex, or the most easily recognized of all of them - the Pyramid - it's important to know where these things come from, and why. Today I'm going to talk about the reasons these things exist in Loris, and hopefully give you some ideas on how to integrate them into your game without having to completely replicate the how's and why's of their creation here on Earth.
So, let's start with Pyramids. On Earth, the Pyramids of Egypt were built for pretty much one purpose and one purpose alone: the interment of the mortal remains of their namesake Pharaohs. And before we get into the debate about whether or not any actual remains have been found in the Pyramids, let me assure you that there have been remains found in Pyramids. The commonly accepted archaeological understanding, currently, is that part of why the Pyramids are so sparse in terms of identifiable remains is a reaction to grave robbers and tomb looters: the Pharaonic cults (as well as the very government of Dynastic Egypt itself) moved the bodies into more easily hidden (and thus defended) tombs and burial complexes. If you have these enormous monuments standing as a testimonial to the greatness of your God King, and the looters know there's likely to be all manner of offerings and accoutrements in there to see the dead ruler off to the afterlife, they're going to come knocking. Curse or no. Therefore, since you don't want the looters to desecrate the corpse, you (wisely!) go back in, pack him up, and leave the monument standing.
It bears mentioning that the Egyptians were not the only Pyramid builders in Africa. The Kush (or Nubian) Pyramids were also built as burial monuments, not only for the great rulers of the Kushite empire, but also for their respected priests and other persons of note and import. As with the Egyptian Pyramids, these were looted and their tombs desecrated. Unlike the Egyptian Pyramids, the Nubian Pyramids were apparently organized into actual burial complexes (Wikipedia likes to refer to them as cemeteries, actually), and they appear to have eschewed the Egyptian tradition of building elaborate temple and worship complexes in the surrounding area, preferring to build the worship temples directly into the Pyramids themselves.
So here we have two Earth cultures, both of whom use their monument building as methods of erecting places of burial and worship of their rulers – who are the physical embodiments of the Gods themselves, let's remember – nearly all of which end up getting looted as the years go on. So what do we do about this sort of thing in our game worlds? Do we recreate the Egyptian/Nubian cultures entirely? What if we don't have any Egyptian-Analog Gods to provide this sort of inspiration? What if there was never a Pharaonic culture present in your game world? You want Pyramids, but how to make them fit into your world?
Well, let's talk about Loris for a minute, and I'll tell you how I made this work.
So, remember, I've mentioned more than once that Loris has no creation myth and that the Gods Of Light And Darkness didn't so much create the world as they broke it apart and made it safe for man to live on. The GOLAD (we're using abbreviations, now) also had both Divine and Mortal forms, enabling them to keep to their Godly duties off in The White, while staying hale and hearty on the world of Loris herself. They ruled over Kever for thousands of years, guiding their favored civilization and making it the greatest (but not the only) nation of its age. When I was designing Kever and its surrounding civilizations, I had to come up with an answer to a very pressing question:
Where did the Gods live? Their Divine forms took up residence in The White, naturally, but what about their Mortal Forms? Did they just kip it under the stars every night? Did they stand vigil all day and night, never resting, never sleeping? Where did they live?
The answer became, as I fleshed out more and more of what it actually meant to be alive in the Kever Age, that they lived in the Pyramids. I knew I wanted to have Pyramids in the game, and I knew I wanted them to be the last standing monuments of a once great and powerful (but now utterly destroyed) civilization. And I knew that I wanted them to have at one time been vast, living edifices; bustling with priests, worshipers, and functionaries. So why couldn't the GOLAD actually live in their Pyramids?
And so, as the original twelve Gods became fleshed out, so too did their residences. For Doan and his brother Kalykan, a pair of matching Pyramids – each a full thousand meters to a side at its base – were built on either side of the widest of the 12 sacred Rivers Of Life: The River Natu. Their Pyramids would be connected by an avenue wide enough for fifty men to march shoulder to shoulder, and would meet at the Natu, where they would be connected by a bridge; this bridge would be constructed of both light and dark granite, so as to represent the divine interdependence of day and night. On either side of the grand avenues there were erected buildings for living and doing business. As the buildings were filled, and more were built, each successive row of construction was built one tier higher and broader than the one before it, so that the citizens who lived and worked within them could take to the rooftops to observe their God Kings as they took to the daily parade. It would be considered blasphemy and the highest of crimes to obstruct the view of one of the Gods going about their daily procession. Each dawning, Kalykan would march from his throne within his Pyramid, accompanied by the entirety of his priesthood. He would meet his royal brother at the apex of the bridge, whereupon he would give to Doan the mantle and scepter of Divine Rule, and Doan would kneel to receive them. For the duration of the light, Doan's rule would be kind and merciful. At each sunset, Doan, too, would proceed down his avenue so as to return the artifacts of Divine Rule to Kalykan, who would kneel to receive them, and wield their power justly throughout the night.
And just like that, I had it. The Pyramids of the GOLAD were no enormous burial markers, but rather the crucial keystones of entire, bustling communities. Thousands of functional buildings – merchants, craftsmen, public houses and more – lined the streets of the grand avenues that shot arrow-straight from each Pyramid out to one of the twelve holy rivers. And because the God Kings were living, breathing entities, and because they ruled with visible power, it would be unthinkable to build the highest buildings closest to the avenue: after all, you could not deny your fellow subjects the right of being able to take in the sight of their deliverers. To do so would be treason!
With this one decision, I not only had a reason for the Pyramids (and I also decided that the original twelve GOLAD would get the full Great Pyramid Of Giza treatment, while their numerous offspring would go on to develop the smaller, more angular Nubian Pyramids, among other types of edifice), but I also had some key bits of Keverite culture and history that my players could uncover. By figuring out the why of the monuments, I had also further developed the game world itself. Rather than putting Pyramids into the desert after thinking "Hey, I'd like to have some Pyramids here," the extra time taken to make it fit (remember: you can get away with almost anything as as long as you're consistent) ended up giving me rather a lot of extra detail and information that I could turn right back into the history and "look and feel" of the game. The Great Pyramids of Kever, once thriving centers of cultural development, would eventually become covered and buried under the sands of time. Inside their long-forgotten chambers would be painted hieroglyphs, once vibrant and urgent, now faded and nearly destroyed by time. What was once a grand avenue that would have been lined with cheering citizens standing on tiered balconies is now a sand-covered, time-worn ruin of a city with just barely a few recognizable walls and hearths still visible. The answer to the question "Where did the Gods live?" was not just the answer to that one question, but to a series of questions that hadn't even been asked yet.
Now, of course, not every game requires such elaborate reasons for the rulers of your ancient, once-proud-but-now-vanished empire to build Pyramids. In Egypt, the Pyramids were built on a sort of Works Progress Administration – hundreds of thousands of people were deliberately employed by the government to build these things, and were paid for out of the various taxes the workers and their families had already paid in the years prior to the Pyramid being built. It's also incredibly likely that the people working on the Pyramids were happy and proud to do so, going so far as to actively compete with other work groups: there is evidence of graffiti at the quarry sites of the "we're better than those guys, they're slow and smell funny" variety. If you have a nation that has a large amount of unemployed youth, a lot of stone to quarry, and a good solid tax base to pay them out of (most likely in food, drink, clothing, and housing), there's no reason not to build a Pyramid or some other monumental edifice. The Parthenon, for example.
But what about the various Henges, stone cairns, and plinths that dot the rest of Loris? If I ever get around to providing you a map of the known world, you'll see that these things are thick on the ground, as it were. If Loris never had a neolithic culture (it didn't), why would these things get built? If I don't have the catch-all answer of "The Druids Did It" in Loris (I don't), then who did it?
Again, I had to stop and consider what would make these things internally consistent with the rest of the world I'd been establishing. Given that there are no Druids in Loris (sorry, Druid Hopefuls!), and that there was never a Neolithic age for all these massive stone circles, spires, and mounds to get built by, why are they there?
Well, again, you don't actually need elaborate reasons to build these things, but it helps. In the case of Loris, we have a built-in historical reason for various cultures to get together and start building these sorts of things: we have The Sunfall.
Remember, The Sunfall blasted most of the civilizations that weren't Kever almost literally back into the stone age, and I've spoken about the various ways in which things can go bump in the night in Loris. Putting these two things together, then, I have a few very good reasons for the survivors to start building these "primitive" stone monuments.
As the remnants of those pre-Sunfall civilizations started scraping themselves back together, they would of course start coming across places in which The Knot was just a bit too strong or a bit too weak, and of course, bad things would invariably happen. Oh, sure, good things would happen, too, but let's face it: when you find a mysteriously mystical place in the middle of the forest, it's almost always going to be something bad. So the wise men and women of these fragmented cultures would get together and figure out ways of capping these places. Of plugging these holes. Of creating gates and locks on these rips and tears and doors into the other worlds that make up The Knot. And they did it with stone and hard work, and they did it with knowledge passed down from parent to child. And perhaps, eventually, the incantations and inscriptions were forgotten by all but a handful of people. And maybe, just maybe, some of those gate-locks are starting to wear a bit thin, because perhaps one-too-many farmers have nicked "just a little" stone from this circle or that one-too-many times.
And for some reason, some vast and forgotten reason, so many of these circles are within a days walk of the walls of some of the largest cities in the Allied Nations, that it can't be a coincidence. Can it?
My players read these essays. I'm not saying.
But there you have another trail of thought on the why's and wherefore's of monument building: The "stone circle" builders don't have to be an ancient and mystic order of magical shape-changing folks who cut mistletoe on the first night of the full moon. They can be panicked locals who are tired of nightmares seeping up out of the ground. They can be grateful farmers who erect permanent gates for the helpful spirits to come through in hopes those same spirits will continue blessing their crops. They might even be the lucky survivors of twin kingdoms ravaged by The Sunfall, who managed to keep enough mystical and arcane knowledge intact so that they knew exactly what would happen if they didn't get those rocks in place, and soon. And when the Kolanthans came, with their armies and their engines of war, and knocked those blasphemous relics of the old beliefs aside?
Well that would just be bad, wouldn't it?
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