Very little hilarity happened today, but even so it was a good day. I had the day off work, which meant I got to sleep in, but had enough cleaning and other plans to keep me more than busy enough. We had a friend come over, but most of what I was doing were dull things like laundry. I’m going to be doing quite a lot of gaming this weekend… or at least, at lot of character building. And just to make sure the weekend is awesome I’ll be roughing it somewhat, setting up the tent and camping in our friends yard. The game should be interesting since it’s mainly a pirate game taking place in the Shackles… a hive of pirates run by a man now known as the Hurricane King. My character, Demona, is a brothel owner in the Shackles, and an information broker of no small caliber… or at least that’s the idea.
I’ve decided that she follows, at least nominally, a quartet of Arch-Demons, known as the Whore Queens. Which leads me to my gripe for today’s blog. The book has very little information on these demonic deities and from what I can tell, even the book on demons in that world simply gives the information “the whore queens are believed to be angels who fell hoping to find power and equality in Hell.” Long story short, they didn’t. But each has become powerful and worshiped in her own right, even with the bigoted male demons working against them, which is interesting. It’s not just their fight of do I/don’t I and good/evil, which every demon makes, it’s also the inner conflicts that mirror the ones they are making in their world. How did they gain power and respect? Do the other demons respect them for it after all this time or are they still treated more badly than others?
Since the books are less than useless (and I’m a “couch-feminist” in case you couldn’t already tell), I’ve decided that since the books do give me the names, I’m going to write up a story for each of them, what trials and tribulations they’ve faced, who their allies, enemies and minions are, and finally what their goals and dreams are. It would be nice to know what they require of their followers. They’re Lawful Evil… do they require sacrifices? If they do, are males the preferred offering, since in Heaven and Hell all four were treated as little more than decorative wrapping?
They say when you’re holding a hammer every problem looks like a nail… I’d like to change that slightly. When you’re a writer, you react to every situation by wanting to write about it. To quote Timothy Clarke (writing, in turn, about Lazette Gifford), “I’d be afraid to get between you and a sheet of blank paper if you had a pen in your hand.” Off hand, a fellow Nanowrimo-er re-quoted it at me last November, when I told him that I’d was pushing to get over 80k in the month, and he knew that I’d only written 2k in the first week.
Anyways, so I’m taking on a new writing project as well, in writing up the Whore Queens, to be (hopefully) used as a supplement in our Dungeons and Dragons Pathfinder game. If possible, I’d like to write 5 – 10 pages on each of the four, fleshing them, their religions and their priests out. If any of you have official information on them to help me out, I would really appreciate your help. After all, there’s no point just writing up what I happen to think if it’s going to be completely wrong and thrown out my GM’s window when/if they put out more on it, right?
This does make me stop and wonder why though. Such interesting characters, and they get a few lines in the main Pathfinder book? Even in the Book of the Damned; Princes of Evil, which focuses on the demons/devils/otherworldly evil of the Pathfinder word, a book of over 100 pages, they spend a meager four paragraphs on them, I’m assuming one each (although I don’t own the book yet. Again, if you do, letting me know what the domains of each Whore Queen is would be nice as well).
Do they truly think that nobody will care or have the desire to look into them more? It’s not just a state of the industry in this case, but a state of them deciding that women don’t constitute a large enough share of the “target audience”? Why go to the trouble of mentioning them at all if you don’t plan on expanding on the information? This is my real point of contention. In a novel, you hope to have the entire world planned, and if you are truly blessed you may be able to use 40 – 50% of the history and setting info in your book. You need enough setting to have everyone understand what the setting is, how the world works, but you can’t do so at the expense of the story. If there’s one thing I hate when I’m reading my books, it’s having the author suddenly take five pages to info dump the history of the last war on me.
With a gaming book though, you’re writing it the other way around. You want to include every organization, even rule for how the world works, all of the important people, and a bit of what their plans are. A gaming book is all about making the setting so interesting and well thought out that people won’t want to leave it. Gary Gygax, known as the Father of modern gaming, knew this and his world Living Greyhawk (Known to it’s inhabitants as Oerth) is still being played today, with its adherents who hate the idea of playing in any other world. Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Forgotten Realms setting followed in Gygax’s footsteps, and in my opinion, the Faerun source books are brilliant. More than enough information on everybody who could be important to your game, while leaving more than enough open for the GM’s to make it their own.
Now, I haven’t read the entire Pathfinder book yet, so I’m not going to argue that they haven’t done their work yet. The odds that you can fit everything into a single book is slim when you’re doing world building for a gaming system and as I have noted, Source Books are still being released for the world setting, so it’s not as if they aren’t working to fill in the gaps. I will say that thus far, I am disappointed with the information on such interesting characters and that I hope my additions will be looked at fondly, and leave it at that… for now, at least.
On a final note, I do want to let everyone know that I reserved my hotel room for SiWC later this year in October… I can’t wait to get there!
