Now I’m interested in making mythologies for fictional cultures/universes. The rule I’m setting for myself is to not go too far in the Proto-Indo-European mythology rabbit hole by having deities basically be carbon copies of Greek gods, for instance.
In the first place, what even is a god? Different religions probably think of their deities in different ways, and the ways in which deities are thought of can evolve over time. Gods can rise and fall in significance and popularity, and certain concepts can be emphasized and de-emphasized as time goes on. In the natural ever-flowing marketplace of religious ideas and motifs, change is not only expected but mandatory.
I think supernatural entities are central to religions, but they don’t really need to think of divine beings in the same way more popular western religions do. I was reading the Rogue Lineage / Tales from the Valley lore and it’s pretty interesting and cool, but, perhaps most importantly, it seems unique and novel, which just amplifies the mystery aspect of the world. If only Rogue Lineage had placed more emphasis on that…
Yeah, we get to meet Ya’alda appears, but that’s about it I think.
Having said this, it shouldn’t be a problem if I start with a mythology eerily similar to Greek or Jewish or Irish or Germanic mythology as long as I make it mine, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
There is a problem, though. Where are the names going to come from? I need to create something similar to a language and a culture first before doing any of this, or I won’t be satisfied. If I ever perceive that it is too daunting a task for me to partake in, I’ll stop and find a workaround, but I’ll try it.
I won’t try and make an overly complex language, however weirdly worded that is. It won’t have the daunting verbal inflections of Swahili, Georgian or Navajo, nor will it have the numerous cases of Finnish or that other language I keep forgetting, since I need this to be a fairly simple one for me and the average reader to understand and utilize.
Unfortunately, since the average user is neither East Asian, Native American nor African, that means no tones, even though I think that’s a damn shame. It’s whatever though.
This doesn’t mean it will be as analytic as Mandarin or even English. I still plan to add some weird things there to make it recognizable. You know how most Latin words in fiction are discernible by the -us endings? Something like that, but in specific cases.
In any case, I should think about the culture first, since religion is definitely shaped heavily by culture, and language is too. I don’t think the reverse happens with such frequency though.
Next posts will be basically me thinking about this, the people and the mythology that I want to make. Should take a couple weeks, but I can sometimes blitz through these things so who knows
After a semi-long hiatus, I’ve decided to make my culture based in a hypothetical universe of AA, with the culture idea I presented in my recent and only 1-year necrobump:
In that post, I already created a universe, habitat, population, and even a sample word to build the language up from, though I could have made the word an exonym.
This kind of fucks with the general “creating a religion” thing that I was doing initially, but I am of the opinion that even though the gods existed once, people can still decide not to believe in them. Their religions would probably be derivatives of the original though.
Just look to the original Jewish religion and its evolution from being polytheistic to monotheistic (if you want to know, look it up). It’s very possible depending on changing understandings and relationships with the gods in the ages.
Alternatively, I could have the new religion be a derivative of a cult or tiny sect, like Christianity. Really unlikely unless someone who practiced said derivative was placed in a position of power, but it’s fine.
Nomadic cultures seem interesting, though I find that my lack of knowledge in the field might be somewhat problematic, and so I’ll dedicate a good amount of time just reading and absorbing information on life as a nomad. I want this to be as thorough as I can realistically make it.
The culture’s general lack of good magic genes probably contributes to their lack of belief in the original gods, since I imagine the history of the universe is something that mages in magic schools (which probably exist for a multitude of reasons) are extensively taught. Think of the relationship between this culture and schools as that between an american Christian and a science class, except most of their children don’t go to school.
Since nomadic pastoralism is commonly practiced in regions in little arable land (go figure), these peoples will have to live in a generally infertile land mass. Most nomadic pastoralists are found in central Asia and the Sahel.
Those in Central Asia mostly lived in the steppes, a steppe being an area categorized by grassland plains without trees except near water. They usually have drastic extremities in weather during the seasons and the day-night cycle and a semi-arid climate (not quite a desert, but very little precipitation).
The Sahel is the area of transition between the Sahara and the savanna in Sudan. It’s mainly flat, and contains semi-arid grasslands, savannas, steppes, and thorn shrublands. It has a semi-arid climate, just less severe than the Sahara. It also receives very little precipitation.
I know Magius is the funny mystical island haha, but depending on its scale, such a culture could realistically emerge. If they were to do so, it’d probably be in the regions between desert and savanna, where the biome I described above would be.
I still kind of need to know how big Magius is though. I reckon that this would really only work if Magius was big enough that just moving to better land would be unreasonable. I could always make it so that they were driven out towards the steppes by other groups, but that’s a last resort, since I’d then have to expatiate on THAT as well.
Assuming the continent is as wide as Russia which is about 5600 miles (or 9000 km for the cool kids), and assuming that the distance given by those in my question thread of 12km across is true, then I can put that to scale and measure the width of Magius as well.
From what I can see in the map, the maximum vertical distance in Magius is a straight line directly intersecting the bight at the marshlands’ coastline, which came out as 371 pixels in height as opposed to the 777 pixels of the maximum horizontal distance.
In the Arcane Universe, characters from Greek Mythology are (were?) real, and have (had?) real effects on the world. Real, tangible effects. Although I don’t think this is quite enough for no religious derivatives to ever pop up ever, that is pretty significant.
Perhaps not so since the Age of Magic is gradually coming to an end the way I see it. Natural mages are becoming rarer and rarer, although there are some cultures with a disproportionately high amount of mages.
One of the ways that I have seen Religions evolve is through something I call a hierarchy shift, in the sense that the hierarchy of importance of the gods is shifted, and some gods’ significance either becomes downplayed or overplayed. Basically, people start worshiping a specific god more than the other gods, or place more importance on it. This can be as extreme as wiping out the other gods from the status of “god” in the first place.
As outsiders looking in, it might be weird to imagine a world where Zeus isn’t head of the pantheon, but we don’t worship them (for the most part). Zeus in the western world is famous not because he is worshiped but because he is a reoccurring part of western media. It’s a bit different from worshiping the god. A god’s importance can become inflated if the culture sees what they offer as more needful, or if a cult gains significance over others.
(More importantly, simply living with the gods having existed doesn’t mean they know the stories of the gods and all that stuff. Those stories would need to be communicated to to the humans. If the stories are not communicated to the humans, then it’s a different ball park)
But which god should I choose? It won’t be Zeus, since that’s overly cliche, talk less of not making a lick of sense. This is going to be another ordeal…
Decided to not even bother with this (funny how that turns out), since it was boring in the first place, or rather, the AU’s setting makes it boring. I’m extremely limited in what I can do here. Let’s just say they worship fucking Helios or something. Doesn’t really matter unless they’re hardcore about it.
On to more interesting matters then.
I’ll start working on their cultural practices, language(s), and the intercultural interaction between them and the other cultures. I should be about half way, but the cultural practices and language bit was probably going to contain most of the difficult work anyway.
Since they probably also speak the common tongue (whatever that is, let’s just say English), I’ll think about working on a pidgin tongue between English and their language. I’m not even remotely interested in any of the cultures that exist in-game since they’re all boring save the Doomyrians, Canopians, and Snow Folk, so I will definitely not even be investing time adjusting and tweaking them for my head-canon Magius.
I suppose that depends on how much the gods exposed themselves to humanity, though even them exposing themselves might not guarantee that the whole seven seas knows about them, since eventually Prometheus’ visit to Ian’s cross turned into and old man giving out the secrets to magic.
If they don’t expose themselves often, that leaves room for other religions to develop unhindered, and, when the gods start fighting mortals, those religions will probably have convenient explanations for the phenomenon. After all, not even in Greek myth was the claim made that the entire world worshipped the gods.
Though that depends on literacy. Although I disagreed with Level in that thread, it isn’t unlikely that the Peacekeeper wrote a book or something. Depending on the people group he speaks to and the zeal with which they kept their beliefs (think modern day Abrahamics), they might just flat out deny and consequently villainize him, even if he saved them. After all, the fact of the matter is that it is his fight with Durza that displaced them. That is undeniable.
From this alone interesting social dynamics can appear.
To get the first thing out of the way, I plan on having them inhabit the lower highlighted region of the map:
Although I could have them live in the top region, I reckon that place is colder, and that’s just not what I had in mind for this particular culture.
They would have migrated to Magius sometime during the Great Migration, either joining another culture which they were neighbors to before to leave or building boats on their own to depart.
For lore purposes, we’ll say they arrived at the coastline of what is now called Alvaris, but, finding that the area was too arid for their imported livestock, they moved a little north-west of the desert area, completely avoiding Citrine town, where inhabitants and herders already existed in order to avoid any fighting for herding space and territory.
Eventually their journey would lead them towards the marked area and stayed there, adopting a pastorial lifestyle to cope with the environment.
I’d say this is a pretty good origin story since it doesn’t require that they had a pastorial lifestyle before coming to Magius. They just had to be cattle herders wealthy enough to afford taking their cattle with them. Seems to make enough sense.
It’s more likely that they were a subgroup of an already existing group of cattle herders who were not that threatened by the environmental problems that drove most cultures to Magius, but simply heard of “a land flowing with milk and honey” in the direction of Magius where the fields were plentiful and your cattle could graze without a care in the world. They then clove off their original group, took their cattle, took some resources, and headed to Magius.
Upon reaching Magius, they were met with desert and an already existing established group of people who didn’t really take kindly to more people eating up their already scanty resources. Thus, they were driven out towards the savanna right above the desert, and then driven out even further by the herders that existed there and near Citrine town.
After moving for a while, they eventually settled in the demarcated area in the picture in the last post.
Speaking of which, I can’t keep calling it “demarcated area”, so I might have to actually give it a name. Since they are the Ngrwééy people, how about calling it Ngrwééy as well? It’d be a name given to them by outsiders because they tend to also call their communities Ngrwééy. In actuality, they don’t really consider the area their belonging or something.
Just for fun, Castlian would be Nda Kasshíryá/ǹ̩dà kàʃ.ʃí.ɹʲą́/. The ssh there basically means that the sound is lengthened, like how it’s represented in Japanese iirc. The word “Castlia” comes from a back-formation from “Castlian”, even though there is no such place as “Castlia”. It’s used to refer to any area inhabited by the Castlian people.
By the way, Ngrwééy is an archaic word that basically means “people”, “tribe”, “village”, or “home” in their language, but since the language lacks articles, it can be interpreted more fluidly as “the people”. The noun is an irregular noun, and is technically singular, like English’s “people”.
The normal word for “people” is basically the normal plural of the word “human being”.
This is really good for potential cultural storytelling stuff. It’s been a literal millennia after the great migration, I imagine that the stories surrounding their rejection by the groups in the south east and their arrival at their land would be a very important story in their tradition.
Their dislike for the Alvarians wouldn’t really be that strong, but their stories basically contain episodes of the Alvarians driving them out, so there’s bound to be some hostility. Inversely, the Alvarians probably don’t even remember that ever happening, and only did it for practicality. They aren’t war-faring peoples though, so they just avoid Alvaris’ area of influence.
Generally, they herd goats, sheep, and cows, and basically get all their produce either directly from those three animals, or by trading the produce they get from those two animals. They produce cheese, milk, meat, and fur and sell them to trade for cloth materials to make their tents and clothing. Most of them are always on the move, and spend 1 or 2 months in one place at a time. Some cultures also buy sheep blood, which has some superstitious uses.
They usually sleep in tents or tiny conical houses made of wood they forage. The houses are necessarily not that eloquent, since they can be dismantled and discarded at a moment’s notice. They usually carry their load on the backs of cattle.
