I've always left certain parts of the game unexplored so I can go back later and crack them. Unfortunately, I'm mid-project on Bonespear Tower right now and one of the things I've left mostly untouched is the castles in the game, but I was trying to figure out something else obscure that ended up involving the Castle Anwyn surroundings. This is the Dervich Felenar reference in its play.net "rumors" section, who has a wanted poster in the constable's office for being a con man. The rumor is probably apocryphal (some of those are totally wrong) with Dervich Felenar likely being some NPC in the 1995-1997 time period where we have a newsletter gap.

The reason this is unfortunate for me is that I suddenly realized Castle Anwyn and possibly even Castle Varunar might be indirectly related to the Shadow Valley story in terms of mythological subtext. This would not be surprising because Anwyn was part of the Vvrael story, which had borrowed heavily from I.C.E. Age source materials. And that means a lot of important stuff in terms of esoteric allusions probably only ever was revealed with in-game events and twenty year old logs. Castle Anwyn was also put in the Lysierian Hills, which was where "Silver Valley" would have been found originally, and had been built by GM Kygar as surrounding context for the Broken Lands.

So before I waste a lot of time digging through ancient websites, what does anyone have about those castles? I know the basic points that Terate grew up in Anwyn and was driven mad / obsessed by a Vvrael related scroll, his mother was a sorcerous queen who went mad and executed the whole kingdom thousands of years ago, and that she released demons on adventurers but Onar intervened to save them and the castle almost faded out of existence. I've read Mnar's synopsis about those things.

- Xorus' player

---

>You see Lord Xorus Kul'shin the Atlas Obscura of Elanthia.
>He appears to be an Insufferable Know-It-All.

That would help. It isn't necessarily related to Shadow Valley, it's just these language games. Lough Ne'halin seems to be Old Welsh / Irish / English meaning roughly "lake without salt", and Annwn is the "Otherworld", fortress on an island with magical mists. Burial mounds. So on. There are other things like a severed head on a pike in the throne room possibly referring to Vran (Bran) the Blessed. Carceris would translate as "prisoner" in Latin. Nononimos are basically "nine cells", they're used in puzzles.

Castle Varunar has little in the way of potentially symbolic stuff in it. But Varuna was the chief god of the Vedic pantheon, and the Shadow Valley story looks partially based on the story of Vala and the Vedic serpent demon Vrtra who was warded off by sacred cows. That could be a total coincidence. But I've also noticed the creatures in the two castles use the same generation / death messaging as the dybbuks in Bonespear Tower and the seekers on Mount Aenatumgana. (all ~ 1997 - 1998)

Or a really hard game of Tetris. :)

There are a lot of similarities between the two castles, it turns out, even beyond the castle architecture stuff. Down to mice looking at you and strange symbols. The thing that kicked me was recognizing Annwn and remembering the heavy chains description on the pookas comes from Celtic folklore and my suspicion that the spectral miners are Welsh "knockers." Now my confirmation bias is in overdrive. Is the "nine cells" an inferno allusion? Math, king of Gwynedd? The nine maidens of the cauldron?

And that story about Terate and the scroll feels like your standard "you read from the Necronomicon now the demons are inside your head" Lovecraftian motif. And of course Varunar has spectral monks and undead horses, undead horses with time slowing distortions no less, and Anwyn has a pentagram room like Bonespear.

Thank you. I will try once I figure out what exactly to ask. It is turning out there was a whole King Arthur, Holy Grail thing going on in the subtext of the Vvrael story that I'm guessing went over everyone's heads. Here is a concrete example: Terate's last name "Niebelun" refers obviously (in hindsight) to the Nibelung, a race of dwarves from Germanic / Scandinavian folklore, and that is related to the Bran the Blessed story. Bran is apparently a kinsman of Hagen from the Nibelungenlied epic.

It keeps going and going, it will take me a while to parse all of this, including the Percival parts. Wagner had operas about both the Nibelung and Parsifal, so there could be stuff hiding in there, too. In the German version the Grail is a stone that fell from heaven, like the lore song on his void blade. King Arthur had an ivory throne. King Arthur went to the equivalent of Annwn to be healed by a sorcerous "elfen queen." The "Thirteen Chosen" are looking like "Terate and the Knights of the Round Table".

And then you have Daephron Illian. Aging backwards through time, going from an old man to a baby. What does that sound like now? Merlin.

The bone seat would potentially be Arthur having an ivory throne in at least Chretien de Troyes Erec and Enide, and there is also a medieval Welsh poem about Annwn regarding the fortress of Caer Sidi, and elsewhere that is referred as having a chair where the person sitting on it is free of disease and aging. Caer is "fortress" in general, though Carceris is Latin for prisoner. I've got no theory for the greenwing hornets or gargoyles yet, and only speculation for all of the birds. The Niebelung were the royal line of Worms (city in Germany), it was the capital of their Kingdom of the Burgundians, that might be why the entrance to Anwyn references roa'ters.

The head on the pike is probably about Bran the Blessed. He and Arthur invade Ireland fighting a war with King Math over a magic cauldron, which bubbles with the breath of nine pythonesses and brings the dead back to life though they cannot speak. That's probably part of the reason for all the writhing serpents. Bran is mortally wounded and he tells them to cut his head off. They bring it with them to an island associated with Annwn where he continues to speak to them, and they spend 80 years there without aging and all of that. And nonominos are usually serpent shaped mathematical objects with nine parts to them. I have not worked up a theory about the queen in the mirror yet. But an evil queen in a mirror is more than a little familiar sounding, so if it is based on something, it might not be that hard to track down.

The story of Arthur going to Avalon (Annwn) be healed by a sorcerous elfen queen also first appears in Chretien de Troyes, who was the first one to introduce the Grail concept to the Arthur legends. I have a log of a vision Raynne received where Terate is dying, then the darkness reaches out to save him and his body is transformed, then the next image is him resting on the throne of bones in front of the grisly audience. I'm going to have to read a lot to try to figure out the rest.

I figured out the Shadow World / I.C.E. Age basis of the Vvrael story a long time ago. The Eye of the Drake (Rift entrance) corresponds to the Eye of Utha, an orb over an ornate pedestal. Terate to Ondoval and Schrek. The void blade to Lorgalis' Blade of the Void ("Lord Implementor") and Ondoval's knife of the void. The Vvrael to the Unlife and the Agoth. The eight stones possibly to the Shadowstone (needed to enter the Eye's keep at the north pole) and the eight crystals of the Jerak Ahrenreth.

The other side of this is being in the Lysierian Hills, near the entrance to the Broken Lands and where Silver Valley would have been. Terate actually wore a ki-lin horn. The Eye of Utha, Uthex Kathiasas, Arthur's father was Uther Pendragon. The Niebelung stuff is filled with dragon slayer stuff. The demon of Shadow Valley was a serpent demon dormant deep underground, a "wyrm", which in medieval lore guard burial mounds. Anwyn's pentagram room has a huge fissure leading deep into the underground darkness. In Shadow Valley the ghostly pookas get their description from Celtic folklore rather than what's in the Rolemaster bestiaries, and I had previously theorized the spectral miners were based on Welsh/Cornish "knockers", the ghosts of dead miners. I think Shadow Valley is partially based on the Vedic myth of the serpent demon Vrtra who fought the devas. The two classes of deities in Zoroastrianism were ahuras and daevas, and Vrtra fought the Vedic devas, including Varuna which is what drew my attention to Castle Varunar. But more to the point, Ahi ("snake") was an eponym of Vrtra. Mnar's synposis for the Castle Anwyn story refers to an "Ahrani witch."

I'll dig around Xorus. I looked for the full original log for a while, but I think I've only ever seen snippets. Onar and all that with the Queen is somewhat common knowledge. It was a cool quest and Anwyn should rise up as a power every once in a while to remind people how cool it was.

I got a bunch of old random stuff a few years ago from a defunct GSIII library site. It had some random empire stuff, player written things and probably some Anwyn bits, but for the most part I think I posted anything I had extra on the WIKI.

Anwyn is tricky though. It's one I've never quite managed to review deeply myself after having been involved in the end of it.

You still have these theories posted somewhere? I remember you had a website you turned back on when you came back. I know you wiki most of it too. It's just an unheard of kind of viewpoint matched with ICE know how. What a convoluted lore and you always seem to decipher it.

I hope that CoL PC driven stuff continues and the player tavern in Solhaven to encourage darker stories.

-Geijon

Oh. The obvious possibility for the evil queen in the mirror as folklore allusion would be the Snow White fairy tale. "Mirror, Mirror on the wall..."

In context with the Nibelung, the story is Germanic, and it's her with her seven Dwarves. That could explain all the birds.

- Xorus' player
(now pondering Maleficent / sleeping beauty / transforming into a wicked dragon)

Here's a couple of more, since there is no Edit button, preventing me from just making one big post. Since Anwyn is pretty clearly the medieval Welsh "Annwn", the Lysierian Hills would be explained by "lys" or "llys" being the royal court of a Welsh gwlad (country). In the past I had no convincing hypothesis for it, other than possibly alluding to the Elysian Fields (other world) of Greek mythology. It might refer to both. The Hades / Lord of the Underworld thing fits well enough with the pentagram.

I've never had any explanation for Mount Aenatumgana. But now with the Welsh insight, I see you can parse it as Aen Atum Gana, which is Welsh Egyptian Sanskrit. Aen means "to go." Atum is the Egyptian god of creating and destroying the universe while sitting on a mound. He acts through the Eye of Ra, and the whole point of the shrine is the "Eye of the Drake", or "Eye of Koar." Gana are the attendants of Shiva, who sits on top of a legendary mountain in perpetual meditation, just like Koar.

Loosely, that translates in combination as "our fellowship is going to the beginning/end of the world", which is pretty much what was happening in the end of the Vvrael quest. Shiva is thought to be a continuation from the earlier Vedic "Indra", who was the one that finally slayed the demon/dragon Vrtra. (Titled: "Vritrahan".)

- Xorus' player

"if they were being very cute Arthur's etymology is Art-ri from Old Irish" -- Xorus

Interestingly, my very first character, ever, was a fighter named "Ardrhi", whom I wanted to get up to 20th level (but bailed, when I figured out that a Thief could train in everything useful that a Fighter could, and hide and ambush and double in traps & locks, for very little more in the way of training points).

That would have made him "Lord High King" in the Gaelic. :)

I'm going to walk back the "Aen" on Aenatumgana being Welsh, because in context it makes more sense if it refers to "Aetna" or "Aenos." On Mount Aetna, Zeus was worshipped with a statue. On Mount Aenos, he was worshipped with a temple. Then all three parts are about a chief god who resides on top of a mound / mountain. The Colossus north of Danjirland was part of the Vvrael story, but it resembles the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the other ancient wonders of the world. (In terms of the archaic Shadow World timeline I think it might refer to the conqueror Ugus Fost who controlled those forests until it was destroyed by priests of the Unlife.)

Interestingly, on the Hindu side there was a legend of a demon, Arunasuras, who sought to destroy the gods and they met on Shiva's mountain to plan against it. (That's another possible "aruna" hook for Varunar.) The demon was taken out with a huge swarm of bees, wasps, hornets, locusts, etc.




Lysierian Hills

(1) Elysian Fields
In terms of the Elysian Fields parallel, the Lysierian Hills is Underworld themed. It's basically "the good part of Hell."

* Anwyn refers to Annwn, the Celtic Otherworld or Underworld.

* The Broken Lands must be entered by walking below ground, and its landscape is heavily derived from the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", specifically the section where the narrator climbs to the top of a mountain to meet the gods of Earth and is kidnapped by nightgaunts (they are represented by the vruul) into the Underworld of the Dreamlands. (The story ends with him going to a castle on top of another mountain and encountering a pharaoh demon; the ending of this story is what our death mechanics messaging was based on, and probably also the exit of Shadow Valley.)

* Shadow Valley was originally called Silver Valley and was located in what we call the Lysierian Hills. It might still be, it isn't clear to me if the whole valley moved underground later, or if it is merely coexistent in two places like the Red Forest. The base story suggested you could walk there above ground. In any case, the landscape of Shadow Valley is heavily derived from the H.P. Lovecraft and Zelia Bishop story "The Mound", which involves a flying serpent demon Yig. (Yig is considered in the story to be the true underlying ur-daemon behind mythical Mesoamerican underworld snake gods like Quetzlcoatl.) The whole thing takes place in a kingdom deep underground, and the whole thing is dream themed. It was guarded by what in the game of moaning spirits, which can travel to and from the underworld, and there are moaning spirits in Castle Anwyn. There are a lot of language games in the Shadow Valley story. The narrator Selias Jodame is a mix of Greek and Hebrew meaning "he who praises the moons." Another example of Hebrew is Jaron Galarn. You have to yell his name because Jaron means shouting.


(2) Shadow World
In terms of the in-game history on the archaic timeline, Uthex Kathiasas was working in the Broken Lands about six thousand years ago. He was killed in the same year the half-Dark Elven warlord Lorgalis conquered this whole region. (Lorgalis was implicitly who Kestrel Etrevion served, and was probably Muylari's master in the Silver Valley story.) Lorgalis possessed the "Blade of the Void" that Terate's void blade is obviously based on. The leapers outside Anwyn Castle are called "bounders" in the Rolemaster lore, where they are used as hunting hounds by Dark Elves. Since Terate has this King Arthur aspect to him, and Arthur's father is Uther Pendragon, I'm wondering if Terate's elven father is implicitly supposed to be Uthex? Is that why he has a ki-lin horn?


(3) Greek Myths

* The demon of nightmares is Ephialtes, named after the betrayer of Sparta in the war with Xerxes, who was a Giant (like Bran the Blessed in the Welsh mythology.) Greek Giants are often depicted with serpents for legs. Ephialtes and his giant brother Otus try to throw mountains on top of each other to confront the gods and steal Artemis and Hera for themselves. Ephialtes ends up bound to a pillar with snakes in the Underworld, with a nymph in the form of an owl over him. The name "Ephialtes" means "leaper", like the creatures outside Castle Anwyn.

* In Dante's Inferno, Ephialtes is one of the four giants that lowers people down into the Ninth Circle of Hell, which is symbolically represented in the bottom level of the Graveyard. (There are numerous Inferno references in the Graveyard story.)

* The Ephialtes story is essentially cognate to the story of the dwarves Fafnir and Fasolt trying to take the Goddess Freia as promised by Odin for building the castle Valhalla, which I will explain is largely the basis of the Nibelung story. In Wagner's opera they are giants.

* The Greek god of bee-keeping, Aristaeus, gets all of his bees killed by the sisters of a nymph he gets killed by stepping on a snake. He sacrifices bulls and cow, and bees re-emerge from their rotting corpses. Mythologically, generally speaking, bees are supposed to be able to travel between the natural world and the Underworld.


Germanic Mythology

There seems to be two things going on here, one part is the Arthurian legend and the other part is about Siegfried. Arthur and Siegfried are both national founder myths with magical swords. The Germanic version of the Arthur legend is a medieval story about Parzival, and the Siegfried story is related to the Norse mythology where a dragon is slayed. The real life Nibelung dynasty has Scandinavian roots, and of course, Britain was repeatedly invaded by Germans and Vikings.

(1) Der Ring des Nibelungen and Nibelungenliend
Wagner's huge opera cycle involves the story of Siegfried who slayed the dragon Fafnir with a magical sword. The last part of the opera is "The Twilight of the Gods", where the gods are all being killed. Wagner also made a famous opera about Parsifal (Parzival, Percival) who is the legendary seeker of the Holy Grail.

* In the "Siegfried" part of the opera Siegfried falls in love with Brunnehilde, who he wakes up, and he gives her the ring out of love. The ring is able to dominate the world, but its power is based on the denial of love. This is relevant because Terate Niebelun gave Raynne his ring and sword, where the ring is etched with: 'A love held close and true in the heart can never die.' (There is no convincing basis in Shadow World for the ring, though it could refer to Lorgalis' obsidian ring that blocks mentalism. I do not know if Terate's ring actually does anything.)

* Hagen murders Siegfried over the ring. Hagen is a cognate character to Efnysien from the Welsh stories about Bran the Blessed, his half-brother who killed all of the horses and caused the war with King Math that ends up getting Bran's head severed. (What is it with this game and killing everyone's horses?)

* The general idea of the Siegfried story is that the Nibelung, the royal dynasty of Worms / Burgundians that fell to Attila the Hun in the 5th century, had a horde of treasure that was guarded by a dwarf. In the treasure is the world dominating ring and a helmet that transforms Fafnir into a dragon, which Siegfried ends up slaying.

* The subterranean dwarf thing with the Nibelung is associated with the Niflheim (land of cold and mist) and Nilfhel (the land of the dead). This could explain why Terate's Castle Anwyn is unnaturally cold.


(2) Parzival and the Grail

Percival generally speaking is the nephew of the Grail King and one of the Knights of the Round Table. Parzival is an adaptation by Wolfram von Eschenbach of Chretien de Troyes incomplete text about him. Wagner also made an opera about this story, which he titled Parsifal. His Parsifal is a fool. I'm not sure if anything is specifically relevant.

* In the medieval Germanic version of Parzival, the grail is a stone that fell from heaven. It has also been associated with the demonic in medieval Germanic legend. It supposedly fell from the crown of Lucifer (the fallen / morning star) in his battle with Michael, and he gets banished to Hell. The devil is often depicted as a snake or dragon, like in the Book of Revelations.

* Pentagrams as warders of evil, specifically preventing one from leaving, is Germanic and not Celtic. Goethe has Faust does it to Mephistopheles. However, it is called a Drudenfuss in German, which means "druid's foot." (There are other stories where Percival's friend Gawain has a shield with a pentagram on it.)

* The loresong on Terate's void blade, the analog of Excalibur or Siegfried's Gram/Balmung, includes: "He follows in the footsteps of his Queen and mother, learning the sorcerous arts, pushing further and further into arcane theory researched within ancient tomes found in the castle's extensive library. His fame is further augmented upon the day he finds a wondrous stone which speaks through the heavens." (Wolfram often refers to the grail stone as "wondrous".)

* The German version also includes him fighting his half-brother knight badly and saying "I was against my own self", and his name ends of the grail making him the new Grail King. (He had traveled previously to a castle in another world to meet with the wounded Fisher King / grail king, who is thought to be based on Bran the Blessed.) In Frijthof's chronicle of the Vvrael story he says: "Terate, however, did not kill. To the astonishment of all, he traveled in and out of the rift, rescuing the dead and even attacking the minions of the Vvrael. 'It is like attacking ourselves,' he was heard to say, in anguish."

* Generally speaking, Percival stories involve learning virtues like humility in his quest for the Grail, so that's a solid subtext for the Stones of Virtue in the Vvrael quest.


Miscellaneous Mythology


* The Greek god of bee-keeping, Aristaeus, gets all of his bees killed by the sisters of a nymph he gets killed by stepping on a snake. He sacrifices bulls and cow, and bees re-emerge from their rotting corpses. Mythologically, generally speaking, bees are supposed to be able to travel between the natural world and the Underworld.

* The word "nightmare" descends from the word "mare" in various languages, which are goblin or spirit things that ride on horses or people's chests. When the mare is outside of its body, it takes the form of a familiar, often bees and wasps. In terms of the game the Lysierian Hills horses became shadow mares / nightmares in Shadow Valley. The stables are empty in Castle Anwyn, and I mentioned earlier Loch Arthur being next to the village of Beeswing, named after a famous mare.

* Castle Varunar's rumor section says it is thought to have traded hands back and forth between lightness and darkness. This might refer to the fact that Varuna and the other Devas were originally on the side of the serpent/dragon Vrtra (darkness), but then switched sides and supported Indra in defeating him.

Here are a couple of connections between the Siegfried and Holy Grail strains without relying on Wagner:

(1) Alberich

Siegfried has to fight the dwarf Alberich for the ring of the Nibelung, who corresponds to the Norse Andvari. However, Alberich is derived from the Frankish sorcerer Alberich, whose name in Old High German means "elf king." He is the legendary brother of Merowech, the eponym of the Merovingian dynasty. The Merovingians have been (baselessly) speculated of having married into the bloodline of Jesus Christ, which ties into Holy Grail speculations because of the "holy blood" idea of the Grail. This other older meaning of Alberich gets you from the Nibelung legend of dwarves back over to elven kings and between French/German Holy Grails.


(2) Sleeping Beauty

The legend of Siegfried (Sigurd) giving Brunhilde (Brynhildr) the ring of the Nibelung involves the idea that she was put into an enchanted sleep by the king of the gods (Odin) until a man awakens her, and that being able to understand the language of birds, he was able to go to her and wake her up and the whole love thing. He was later cursed by the sorcerous queen of the Burgundians, Grimhild of the Nibelung dynasty, and her sons (Hagen) end up killing Siegfried. She also manipulated Brynhildr into marrying her children, bringing the curse of the ring into her family. (Fun fact: Sigurd and Brynhildr's daughter Aslaug is the wife of Ragnar Lothbrok, so by the transitive principle of drawing highly speculative parallels, Terate is the grandfather of the sons of Ragnar on the TV show Vikings.)

The earliest version of the sleeping beauty story comes from the Perceforest which is based on the Arthurian legends. And distantly related, to the same degree as Snow White talking to the birds, you have the Disney version with the evil queen Malificent who can turn herself into a dragon. The Grimhild name also refers to an evil sorceress who turns people into trolls, and this general Viking thing might explain why there are trolls outside of Castle Anwyn. Grimhild is a human sorceress. But I mentioned earlier, the sorcerous queen who heals Arthur (Terate is simultaneously healed and cursed) is the elf queen of Avalon, which is the Welsh Annwn.

Ha. Yeah, I know. It isn't necessarily all that deep even if the references were totally intentional, it just sounds that way when you have to go backwards trying to explain it. In terms of designing it you just have to say, "Throw this in, throw that in..." Then you've leveraged its entire source material and every possible interrelationship. I'm not giving equal weight to all parts of it. The Ephialtes thing is a lot more likely to be a coincidence, for example, than Anwyn or Niebelun not being outright allusions.

In fairness to my sanity though, I cannot do anything remotely like this with most areas in the game. Darkstone Castle is a solid example of that on a similar room area scale, all the interesting stuff is Estrion related. There's just nothing terribly meaningful about the castle itself. I would not be surprised if Varunar is "just a castle."

- Xorus' player

This is section of Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach that led to identifying the Holy Grail with Lucifer:

They who took no part in the conflict, when Lucifer would fight

With the Three-in-One, those angels were cast forth from Heaven's height.

To the earth they came at God's bidding, and that wondrous stone did

tend,

Nor was It less pure for their service, yet their task found at last an end.

I know not if God forgave them, or if they yet deeper fell,

This one thing I know of a surety, what God doeth. He doeth well !

But ever since then to this service nor maiden nor knight shall fiul,

For God calleth them all as shall please Him t— and so standeth it with the

Grail!'

This is the beginning of the French version of Parceval by Chretien de Troyes:

IT WAS THE TIME when the trees were in bloom,

when new leaves grew lush in the woods,

and the meadows were grassy green;

when the birds twittered sweet songs

to welcome the dawn,

and all things were ardent with joy.

The son of the Widowed Lady

of the Forsaken Forest

arose and cheerfully

saddled his hunting horse,

grabbed three javelins

and left his mother’s manor.

He thought he would visit the farmers

who cultivated her grain,

with their twelve oxen and six plows.

As soon as he entered the forest

his heart was filled with delight,

feeling the pleasant weather

and hearing the joy in the birds’ songs.

This would explain why Terate had the title "the Forsaken", and the birds all over the place, and why we always hear about his mother but never his father. The German version would explain why his title said "the Fallen One" sometimes. The grail bearer in the Grail King's castle (his uncle), who derives from Bran the Blessed, was a young girl / maiden. That would explain why Lorminstra would appear as "a young lass." Interestingly, Sir Kay (also spelled Kai) descended from the Welsh precursor Cai (or Cei), and the Shadow World god Cay was shifted to our Kai. I've previously tried to understand it with Shadow World languages.

- Xorus' player

"descendants of Aeneas through Romulus and Brutus." -- Xorus

I state authoritatively that this couple produced no descendents....

Thanks. :) If I did not make it clear earlier, the Bran the Blessed thing fighting over the magic cauldron of rejuvenation/rebirth is a precursor to the holy grail stories, where Bran is transformed into the Grail King and the cauldron becomes a cup. Bran and the Grail King are both mortally wounded in the leg. Later, when his head is removed from the island associated with Annwn where they all did not age for 80 years, his head becomes silent and is buried where the Tower of London is now. It was put there to ward off invasions from France. King Arthur digs up the silent head of Bran the Blessed as an assertion that he can defend Britain himself.

The Celtic culture / religion viewed the head as the seat of the soul, so they often had a reputation for being head hunters, keeping the severed heads of their enemies. So, the throne room in Castle Anwyn is surrounded by silent heads on pikes, and the chapel is filled with skulls. (Apparently, a "gruesome skull covered altar" has been unearthed in Provence, France. But I'm having trouble tracking down the details.) I'm not sure if the Onar thing is any deeper than adapting off the skulls.

The idea that the quest up Mount Aenatumgana and then going through the virtues to reach the nebulous sphere refers to _The Divine Comedy_ had come to me before, but with only the three letters "Aen" motivating it and "atumgana" looking like gibberish, I did not press it because there did not seem to be any literary subtext for the Vvrael story. And I had dropped trying to understand "Lysierian Hills" as "Elysian Fields" before figuring out Shadow Valley and The Broken Lands are both Underworld motifs. (In the case of The Broken Lands you push the Lornon button, which was "Charon" originally, and Charon happens to be the boat driver of the River Styx in the Underworld. Then the landscape has a one-to-one correspondence to scenes of traveling through the Underworld in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.) In The Divine Comedy, Dante describes God as three perfect circles that are somehow reflecting off each other like rainbows, and breathing fire through each other. That could explain why the rock behind the nebulous sphere is molten. The portal is over a pedestal because that is a Lord of Essaence style gateway, like the one in Darkstone Castle.


These are some more possible motivations for mixing the stories of Percival/Arthur and Siegfried:

* Sigurd's (Siegfried) father Sigemund is referenced as a dragon slayer in the Old English poem Beowulf, where Beowulf is a legendary ruler of the Anglo-Saxons. Sigemund is called "the son of Wales" in Beowulf, and the King Arthur stories originate in Welsh stories about Annwn.

* Sigurd has a magical sword named Gram. His father Sigmund got it by pulling it out of tree, where it had been embedded by the king of the gods Odin. In the King Arthur stories, his magical sword Excalibur is often conflated with the Sword in the Stone, where the rightful ruler has to pull it from the stone. Sigurd / Siegfried happens to be almost invincible like Achilles, and Terate, but it comes from drinking the dragon blood of Fafnir (where he got the cursed ring from) rather than the sword.

* Hogni (Hagen) of the Nibelung becomes a blood brother of Sigurd (Siegfried) when Sigurd marries their sister. In some versions Hogni is only a half-brother, because his sorcerous queen mother was impregnated by an incubus. (And as a half-brother the story is a cognate of Efnyesien, the half-brother of Bran the Blessed who is married to their sister, where Efnyesien kills King Math's horses causing the war where Bran is killed.) The explanation for Merlin's sorcerous abilities comes from being the son of an incubus and mortal woman, and Terate's power derives from being corrupted / possessed by a dark extra-planar being. And Merlin is imprisoned / cursed by the Lady of the Lake (sorcerous queen of Avalon / Annwn), where there is a whole tutelage thing about magic. Terate learned sorcery from living at the castle with his queen mother.

* In the early Perceval stories, Excalibur actually belongs to Gawain, the nephew of Arthur with the pentagram shield (symbol of Solomon, power over demons.) Perceval is the nephew of the Grail King, and in the German version he becomes the Grail King after that guy dies, who corresponds to Bran the Blessed from the Annwn stories with his severed head. Terate as I mentioned quoted Perceval ("it is like fighting ourselves"), and so does the lore song on his void blade about the wondrous stone.


Pretty much everything I've talked about is Vvrael quest based, because I do not have enough details to parse much from the Castle Anwyn story the year later.

- Xorus' player

I should do a point of disambiguation, because I mixed something up. Arthur did not go with Bran in the war with King Math, he just digs up Bran's head later. What happened is there is another Annwn story where Arthur goes after what is interpreted to be the same magic cauldron. There is also an earlier Welsh version of the Perceval story where there is a severed head instead of a grail, which turns out to be his cousin who was killed by the Nine Witches of Gloucester.

Welsh Arthurian Stories
(1) Culhwch and Olwen: King Arthur sails to get the magic cauldron, the poet Taliesin is described as part of his group. Culhwch is Arthur's cousin.
(2) Second Branch of Mabinogion: Bran the Blessed has to war with King Math involving the magic cauldron.
(3) Preiddeu Annwfn: From the Book of Taliesin. Each stanza contains the equivalent of a mezuzah. Expedition of King Arthur to Annwn, described as a fortress.
(4) Peredur son of Efrawg: Perceval story with a severed head instead of a grail, featuring Sir Cei and Arthur.
(5) Caer Sidi: Book of Taliesin. Begins with the equivalent of a mezuzah. Describes Annwn by several names, like Preiddeu Annwfn, including "the cold place".


While I'm addressing the idea of Dante's The Divine Comedy tie-in as related to The Graveyard, where The Broken Lands and Shadow Valley are spin-off stories, I might as well sketch out what I've been able to discern about original parts of The Graveyard. It looks like a mixture of four threads, with a lot of overlapping parts.

(1) Egyptian Underworld: The basic story is Osiris (Kestrel) and Set (Bandur), with their fates reversed. Horus (Kestrel's sons) apparently lose.
(2) Shadow World: Bandur is pledged to the Empress Kadaena, who has been dead for 100,000 years. The crypt design is based on Orgiana's temple, run by Kadaena's daughter. "Servants of the Shadow" refer to Kadaena's former followers who have fashioned Great Demons. Bandur immolating in ice symbolizes Ordainer demons.
(3) Lovecraft: Bandur corresponds to the pharaoh / "fallen archangel" Nyarlathotep from Dream-Quest, and his behavior looks based on The Shadow out of Time. There is an ancient telepathic race that possesses other life forms in the future, driving them mad, where the victims go on bizarre quests knowing things they cannot know.
(4) Dante: The path starting from the forest, to the gate, down to the frozen pit and back up through to his "purgatory" throne room is an Inferno parallel.


All of the details can sound messy, but the basic idea of the Egyptian mythology is: The pharaoh has to descend to the Underworld and meet Osiris when they die, so that "balance" is maintained and the sun continues to rise and be brought across the sky. This is what you are doing when you bring a candle votive down there for the Order of Voln. The slab where you say "shadow bind my soul" is an Egyptian false door, where you leave sacrifices to feed the pharaoh. This is twisted to mean human sacrifices. Kestrel being mummified in a funerary barge is also part of this symbolism. The Graveyard is on a northeast axis like Egyptian pyramids because of the sun.

The Inferno parallel has multiple points. It begins lost in a dark woods (the forest maze) until Dante finds his way to Virgil and the Gate of Hell. The "straight way" is a recurring theme, so the Graveyard has a few mazes. Beatrice asked Virgil to bring Dante through Hell, where she says she "comes from a place [she] longs to return". Bandur is quoting this when he says: "There is a place that calls me, where I must go." She also says she was made in such a way that the flames cannot burn her. The Graveyard Gate if you visualize the rust patterns is green, but looks like it is on fire, and opens with a flame burst (a "blizzard" of red rust from iron hinges.)

Inferno refers to phantoms at this point as a symbol of forbidding fear, where in the Rolemaster bestiaries phantoms are made from suffering in hopeless imprisonment ("abandon all hope ye who enter here.") Then it refers to the three ladies, one of which is the Virgin Mary. That would be part of the reason why Lorminstra and the Empress are depicted by each other, though having opposing gods by gates leading through the halls of the underworld is also Egyptian. The inside is basically limbo. The bog with the death dirges, who look like soldiers instead of bards, refers to Circle 5 where the wrathful and sullen are two forms of the same sin, destined to fight and drown in the mud of a swamp (which is actually the River Styx). The upended funerary gate (with "demonic" strength and fury) is a trilithon, a Lord of Essaence style portal in Shadow World, which refers to the gate of the City of Dis which the fallen archangels damage out of anger that Virgil is trying to bring a mortal into Hell.

Originally, that tunnel from the entrance to the burial mound downwards into what is now arch wights would not have existed, it was dug by people trying to escape by tunneling their way up before being killed. The only way down there would have been that trilithon portal, and then you would have been trapped down there, because at the time there were no exits. Then you go down there and the frozen area is Circle 9, the betrayers (of brothers, liege lords, God) where Bandur is frozen in a block of ice like Satan. There's a line about "error's thralldom" there, Bandur's book is subtitled "power through thralldom", and that small block of ice is a "thrawl" from medieval ice rooms / larders. Dante and Virgil climb up Satan. The wind down there refers to Satan flapping his wings. The mid-level as a mock medieval palace alludes to them passing through a cavern that is "no palace hall", then they make it to the surface at the base of the mountain Purgatory under unfamiliar constellations (see the Graveyard's throne room.) There is no sun in Hell, where the sun cleanses sin, so this also amounts to harrowing the underworld to rejuvenate the sun.

The theory I've come up with for why we have deeds, because that is not part of the "Lorminstra"'s Shadow World theology, is that it is literally the medieval practice of homage. Your "deed" refers to special rights of intercession on your behalf by a liege lord whom you kneel to and swear fealty, where she used to say "intercede" in the death mechanics, which still contains language borrowed from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. In the burial mound there is a mural about "the deeds" of Kestrel, which Bandur is depicted manipulating things in the background. So I think that is supposed to be mockery. Likewise, the nephews are called "princes all" who died fighting for their "ancestral homeland", neither of which is true of Kestrel's sons. The implication is "Horus tried to take me and failed, now I'm Lord of the Underworld."

- Xorus' player

The "wondrous stone" phrase tying the Holy Grail, based on Latin, to the fall of Lucifer also ties into the connection of Aeneas to Dante. In The Divine Comedy the fall of Satan is what forms Hell, and then all the displaced earth from the impact forms the mountain of Purgatory on the other side of the planet. With respect to Hogni/Hagen and Merlin being born of an incubus with a woman, both stories involving a sorcerous queen, and "incubo" is Latin for the nightmares caused by incubus demons lying on their victims while they sleep. This is cognate to the "mares" who cause nightmares by riding on their victims. The half-demonic offspring of incubi are cambions.[1]

In the modern history for the Faendryl and Enchiridion Valentia, where Enchiridion is Latin meaning a small handbook, there are a few Lovecraft allusions as well.[2] Abdullahi Hazalred Faendryl is a reference to Abdul Alhazred, the "mad" author of The Necronomicon in Lovecraft's stories. Elizhabet Mahkra Faendryl is an anagram referring to the Elizabeth Arkham insane asylum from Batman, where the word "Arkham" was taken from a town with an occult university in Lovecraft stories.

Much more subtly, the Lovecraft story the Shadow Valley serpent demon was most heavily based on (The Mound) referred to a half-anthropomorphic snake demon Yig, who in The Curse of Yig is established as transforming humans who harm his progeny into "the Progeny of Yig." These are snakes with human faces, which look almost exactly like the abyran demons. The underworld from The Mound has time running at different rates than it does on the surface, which is also true of the Dreamlands in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. So my pet theory for the abyran demons has been that their temples to their snake god, and the Enchiridion entry for that valence referring to artificially created verlok demons, might be implying the real reason sorcerers go there and never come back is because they're getting turned into abyran.[3]

- Xorus' player

[1] Meanwhile the giant "Ephialtes" ("leaper") is the Greek demon of nightmares, and cognate to the giant Fafnir who become a dragon and was slayed by Sigurd.
[2] Valentia basically means "strength". The word "valences" comes from an outdated cosmological model from the late 90s, where Elanthia was going to be the rich creamy center of an onion shell model. Punching through to the outer layers, where the hungry demons are, were metaphorically valence shells from atomic chemistry.
[3] http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Progeny_of_Yig (I have no explanation for why the Anwyn leapers are spotted unless they are supposed to allude to these as well.)

<Xorus, quoting Time the Enchanter>

.

"What an eccentric performance..."

The climactic scene where Risper and Terate are facing off in front of the Eye of the Drake before she goes demonic:


Risper says, "The turn is thine."

But if Rebellion can such blest rewards assign,

Cheer up, Beelzebub, the next turn is thine;

We must not say the Learned Father rav'd,

The Devil himself may at long run be sav'd:

If Bloud and Treason lead to happiness,

If these insure Eternal bliss,

In the wise Indian's Prayer,

Oh may I, may I ne'r come there;

- Charles Cleeve (1661)

Risper says, "Let my life be forfeit, but it ends now."

'You know, then, what this thing is? ' said Faramir. `Come, now you have seen, tell me why it should be spared. In all our words together you have not once spoken of your gangrel companion, and I let him be for the time. He could wait till he was caught and brought before me. I sent my keenest huntsmen to seek him, but he slipped them, and they had no sight of him till now, save Anborn here, once at dusk yesterevening. But now he has done worse trespass than only to go coney-snaring in the uplands: he has dared to come to Henneth Annûn, and his life is forfeit. I marvel at the creature: so secret and so sly as he is, to come sporting in the pool before our very window. Does he think that men sleep without watch all night? Why does he so?'

- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Any of that could be pure coincidence. Tolkien happened to be an expert on Old English languages. This is the scene where Gollum is oblivious in their sacred pool about to be shot with arrows, because he is following the halflings on their trek to Mount Doom out of his obsession with the world dominating ring. Faramir uses the phrase earlier saying his own life would be forfeit if he let them go with the ring instead of taking it to his father Denethor. The Nibelung ring is cursed, after all...

- Xorus' player

Found this gem for you:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040122204827/http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/beaconhall/Anwyn_Castle.htm/


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