Also known as Operation: Oh Fuck Me.
So, I have decided to go along with the previously mentioned idea of cutting out all the Celtic mythology from my The Last Blade story. The past two days have been spent coming up with new names for all the main players and places and such and I am in no way close to done. I have a drafted email in Gmail with a bunch of shit just written in there, kind of like a free writing exercise with names and it is messy. Basically this should be easy, just plop a bunch of consonants down, then intersperse them with vowels and y once in a while and its all done. My problem is that I like all of the names I already have, I've grown attached to them and they have meaning. When I think of the Seelie Court, I think of Fey with personalities as shallow as a pool of light and natures as changeable as a flickering flame. That's the Seelie. I want the new name for the Seelie to have meaning as well, but without doing some tie in or using pseudo-Latin names I'm basically creating my own words and that just seems...I dunno what it seems like but I don't like just making up words. The wordsmith in me goes "That is made up and everyone knows it, you look like an ass every time someone reads the word Sokar."
Although, doing a quick Google of Sokar tells me that Seker (Sokar is a variant of that name) has to do with Egypt and death and Sokar is a character on Stargate that has masqueraded as a god of death on many worlds for millenia. Fuck them, I'm keeping the name.
I think I've settled on an idea for the shape of the Courts (I'll be keeping that term at least, although the names of the Courts will undergo some changes). Giant-type Fey will be known as mountain-kin or something along those lines, but instead of breaking it down into Trolls, Jack-In-Irons, Ogres, etc, it will just be Mountain-Kin with the new name of the Court on it. So, instead of Spriggan from the Sluagh, they will be called Sokar Mountain-Kin, or Sokarian Mountain-Kin, something in that vein. (Anyone even remember Sokar? I thought not.) Ancients, which were once called Hags, Gruagache, Hobgoblins, Fomorians (or Firbolgs, I can never remember), etc will now be called Firstborn and the Sidhe will be called the Secondborn (because each Ruler made the Firstborn first and the Secondborn second, the Secondborn consider themselves a refinement of the Firstborn and there is some rivalry between the two races).
Looking back on the early stuff for the Fey has been an interesting trip down memory lane. Some of the choices of Court were odd. Like I put the Phooka (shapeshifters that could transform into a bird of prey or a horse) into the Sluagh (undead Fey), even though the Phooka make more sense as Common Fey, or even Court of Blades Fey. Seeing all the broken ass mechanics I introduced in each version of the races has been interesting as well. There is feat based Glamour, schools of Glamour that you could automaticall use that were just spells taken from spell lists, skill based Glamour that required a check to use, and Glamour that had no mechanic except vague outlines arbitrated on a case by case basis. Glamour never really had a final form, I was alway refining it or trying some other concept to make it work like I envision.
Looking back, it is shocking how oblivious I was to the concept of game balance and fairness. I wonder if it negatively impacted anyone's enjoyment of the game and they just never told me. Oh well, I'm a better DM now and that is something at least. Heck, if you want to get ridiculous, we invented free actions in 2nd Edition and basically ruled that anything you could innately do could be done without taking up any real time. So, Jason could attack like 16 times, lob a fireball, then transform into his mist form to avoid damage from the enemies when they attacked, all in one turn. Eric was able to scare a gelatinous cube to death by transforming himself into Bill Cosby. Later he was able to summon the rabbit from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. In 2nd Edition AD&D balance of any remote kind was not exactly our forte. I think at one point the group played what I guess could be called dragonborn, but we called them spawn (anyone remember spawn from Dragonlance?) and they were platinum spawn that served Bahamut and could breathe disintegration rays. Thank you 40k forums for teaching me of things like codex creep and balance.
The Spellscarred powers and paragon path seems like the closest thing to what I want to achieve with Glamour this time around so that is cool if I do decide to take a go at hashing them out 4th Edition style. I'm too new to the edition to go my own way, I'd like something vaguely reminiscent of a template to work with, and Spellscarred stuff is certainly wonky enough to fit in with the powers at the command of the "Fey." I need some new names, anyone have any ideas? I wonder if they'll add stuff into the DMG 2 about creating new classes and powers and the like, that would be pretty nifty and a bit helpful.
I am suddenly really liking the idea of making whatever the Fey are renamed as my own. It allows me to bring back the draconic "Fey" and the psionic ones without trying to hammer them into Celtic myth as well. Although, I'm not even really sure psionic "Fey" would fit here in this collection of inhuman creatures. I think I'm also going to remove the specific physical features of the "Fey." I've always envisioned this collective race as somewhat malleable as far as physical form. I think just some general guidelines like: mountain-kin are big and burly, forest-kin are small and agile, firstborn are human-like but clearly not and tend to be agile. Things like that. Like a mountain-kin from the "Seelie" Court could be all big and stony but have patches of moss for eyebrows and hair with gold ore for eyes while an "Unseelie" mountain-kin could be all big and rocky and have a beard of icicles and eyes like chips of mountain ice, while a Sokarian mountain-kin could...I dunno have fucking fossils visible in his rocky flesh or something to indicate that he is a piece of undead rock. Or he could extrude the fossils to form weapons and armor. Or he could just be a hacked apart and bleeding version of a "Seelie" mountain-kin, that would actually make more sense (despite the awesomeness of being able to see a living rock with fossils in its very flesh) becasause the Sokar are a kind of afterlife for "Fey" and they only end up as Sokarians if their bodies die.
The more I think, the more I like this thing I am doing here. I'm no longer bound by the constraints of the myths I was taking inspiration from, not that I realized they were constraining me. I think the idea of what the "Fey" were and where they came from evolved over the years and I just forgot to evolve them along with it. Oh man, what if I remove the weakness to iron? Now we've really gone off the reservation kiddies.
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