![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Inventing a Western Ascetic Tradition
Feb. 5th, 2010 12:39 pmI'm trying to build a fantasy world with a number of unusual features. One is that it has a theme: mankind's changing relationship with the divine. Another is eclecticism of source material.
One RPG term I always hated was "feel," as in "this setting has an Arthurian feel," "an ancient Chinese feel," "a pirate movie feel." This usually means the setting is a theme park version of the original, with extra magic and monsters to keep the munchkins happy. I want the "feel" of my settings to be far more ambiguous, so my Dominion of the Dead area, for example, seemed a bit Carolingian with Celtic and Byzantine elements mixed in. At the same time, I want to emphasize commonalities in the component cultures, to give a sense of familiarity and organicism to the whole.
I've relied a lot on similarities between Indo-European cultures, particularly Celtic and Indian. Right now, I'm looking into parallels between Hindu asceticism and Northern European myth and magic. I've taken stray references to extreme privation in the latter -- such as Odin's self-sacrifice for the runes, and bards submerging themselves for poetic inspiration -- and expanded upon them.
I'm also looking into parallels between the Celtic geas and the boons of Hindu epics. I understand they worked very differently -- the former being a taboo, the latter a reward for extreme renunciation -- but I'm looking for a way to mesh them well for (essentially) a Western-style fantasy setting. The big question, for me, is a mechanism. How does burying oneself, or hanging oneself from a tree, earn one protection from harm? This time I'll use the term "feel": How can I make it "feel" right for a Western setting?
One RPG term I always hated was "feel," as in "this setting has an Arthurian feel," "an ancient Chinese feel," "a pirate movie feel." This usually means the setting is a theme park version of the original, with extra magic and monsters to keep the munchkins happy. I want the "feel" of my settings to be far more ambiguous, so my Dominion of the Dead area, for example, seemed a bit Carolingian with Celtic and Byzantine elements mixed in. At the same time, I want to emphasize commonalities in the component cultures, to give a sense of familiarity and organicism to the whole.
I've relied a lot on similarities between Indo-European cultures, particularly Celtic and Indian. Right now, I'm looking into parallels between Hindu asceticism and Northern European myth and magic. I've taken stray references to extreme privation in the latter -- such as Odin's self-sacrifice for the runes, and bards submerging themselves for poetic inspiration -- and expanded upon them.
I'm also looking into parallels between the Celtic geas and the boons of Hindu epics. I understand they worked very differently -- the former being a taboo, the latter a reward for extreme renunciation -- but I'm looking for a way to mesh them well for (essentially) a Western-style fantasy setting. The big question, for me, is a mechanism. How does burying oneself, or hanging oneself from a tree, earn one protection from harm? This time I'll use the term "feel": How can I make it "feel" right for a Western setting?
